7 June 2023

The Professor of Nursing Policy at King's College London explains how she loves to build connections, and embrace complex challenges.

What is your role within King’s Health Partners? 

As well as being Professor of health and nursing policy within the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care, I am Co-Director of the NIHR Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit within the Policy Institute. I am also a governor at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. 

What do you enjoy most about your role? 

The variety, depth, and breadth of opportunity to work with an exciting, innovative group, and talented team of people engaged in research, teaching and quality improvement type work. The opportunity to learn new tricks and use a wide range of research tools is endless.  

I love building connections between people and ideas, and converting these into action and better care for patients and loved ones. For example, I am co-chairing a workforce initiative with Prof Sir Robert Lechler on the health workforce of the future with a focus on KHP. This is a very exciting initiative which we hope will position KHP as a leading-edge provider of digitally enabled education and care. 

What inspired you to get into this work? 

An excitement of the opportunity, intrinsic interest of the task, fun and fabulous people to work with, as well as the opportunity to tackle complex challenges, many of them wicked which require multidisciplinary input, creative and lateral thinking. I’m also very interested in the arts and health, an area where KHP is strong and could be stronger still. The arts are a vital vehicle in improving the health and wellbeing of staff and patients.  

The health and wellbeing of our staff and workforce is the top priority in health systems and we have got to look after our staff better. Our greatest assets are our people, and we need to treasure and cherish them in every way we can. As a governor I am endlessly inspired by the volunteers in KHP - the work they do is amazing and they are a huge part of the careforce. We need to celebrate that too.  

What are the benefits of working in partnership?   

I’m a natural boundary spanner and I love working across boundaries. The sandpit of KHP provides so much scope to play in and figure how to do things better. Our research on teamwork demonstrates better outcomes for patients but you need to nurture teams. Healthcare is a team sport but we would never dream of putting players on the pitch without training; trying to maintain consistency of membership in the healthcare team is an awesome task. The ‘teaming on the fly’ model that healthcare has adopted by accident is a miraculous achievement, mainly because it works…. up to a point. But it could always be better too.   

What would be your one career top tip?  

Ask for help with your career, opportunities and experiences. People don’t really like to say ‘no’!