Lived Experience Director | Lived experience of mental health services, and 20 years working inside them as a practitioner and leader.
I’ve spent years working inside NHS mental health services, and the question I keep returning to is this: what has to change for lived experience to be a genuine leadership function, not a gesture?
I ask that question as someone who holds it from the inside. My own lived and living experience is where I lead from. That comes first. Alongside it, I bring years of clinical and operational experience across the NHS, postgraduate training in CBT and advanced mental health practice, and a Doctorate of Management I am completing at Hertfordshire University, examining what actually happens when lived experience leadership enters NHS governance.
Holding that duality is the work itself. It opens up what professional leadership alone cannot reach.
As Lived Experience Director at Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust, I lead on coproduction, personalised care, and lived experience governance across mental health, learning disabilities, and autism services. I chair the Co-Creation Board, drive Trust Board-level strategy, and strive to ensure that people with direct experience of services shape how those services are led, not just how they are delivered.
My focus is on the things hardest to change: culture, power, and the relational conditions that determine whether coproduction is genuine or performative.
I am interested in connecting with people working on lived experience leadership, coproduction governance, mental health transformation, and complexity-informed approaches to organisational change, in NHS, higher education, and policy contexts.
The work is serious. The conversations should be too.
