About Me
I have worked in health and social care for more than three decades as a clinician, senior NHS leader, commissioner and care provider.
I began my career as a registered mental health nurse before moving into senior leadership roles within the NHS, including serving as an Executive Director of Nursing in a specialist mental health trust. My work has focused on service quality, governance and workforce leadership within complex health and care systems.
Over the course of my career I have also worked in health and social care commissioning and have held non-executive and advisory roles across both public and private sector organisations. These experiences have given me insight into the policy, regulatory and financial frameworks that shape service delivery across the care system.
Following my NHS career, I became a co-owner and director of residential care homes providing services for older people. Through this work I gained direct experience of the financial, regulatory and workforce challenges facing independent providers operating within England’s publicly commissioned social care system.
The closure of my care home business in 2026 has led me to reflect on the structural and economic pressures within the sector, including the interaction between national workforce policy, local authority commissioning practices and the sustainability of independent providers.
I have recently written two papers on the factors underpinning the fragile and unsustainable economic postions for smaller inmdependent care home providers, the first was writted as a submission to the Casey Commission on the key areas i felt from my experience need urgent attention. The second Risk, Pricing and Provider Stability in Adult Social Care, is a more detailed exploration of how financial risk of publically funded care is unfairly redistributed across the English social care system on to private fee payers, providers and staff, and considers whether more transparent pricing frameworks could support a more sustainable provider market and bring and end to these hidden risk transfers.
Alongside my current interest and actvitism in social care policy, and closing my two care homes as well and as safely as I can, I am also a qualified Mountain Leader working with adults and young people in outdoor education and personal development through my venture Adventure into Wellness.
Why I have launched this campaign
I have launched this campaign because my own experience as a care home provider has brought the realities of the current system into sharp focus. Like many providers across the sector, we operated in an environment where the price paid for publicly funded care often fell below the cost of delivering safe services. In practice this meant paying staff less than they deserved because it was all the business could afford, charging higher fees to privately funded residents, and asking families for third-party top-ups when local authority placements did not cover the cost of care. Through the collapse of my own care home business I am now personally facing losses estimated to be between £350,000 and £500,000, much of which reflects the gap between the price paid for publicly commissioned care and the cost of delivering regulated services. This experience has convinced me that the system relies on hidden cost-shifting that is neither transparent nor sustainable, and that a more honest public conversation about how social care is funded is urgently needed.