Congratulations to Gita Bhutani, winner of our Distinguished Contribution to Practice Award
Clinical psychologist Gita Bhutani has been announced as the 2024 winner of one of our Practice Board’s most prestigious awards.
18 March 2024
Throughout Gita's career, she has sought to innovate and develop psychological thinking in a wide range of settings, adhering to the principles of distributed leadership and growing communities of practice to facilitate access to psychology for all.
Gita qualified as a clinical psychologist in Glasgow in 1992, and her career has seen her work in the city as well as Salford and Lancashire and South Cumbria, with an initial focus on working with older people.
In 2013, Gita led the development of the Psychological Professions Network (PPN) in the North West. The PPN brings together psychological professions across the health and care sector to promote the benefits of psychological professions for the public, and seeks to inform, enable, and influence its members and stakeholders to ensure psychological approaches are embedded in health and social care for all.
Gita also adopted the term 'psychological professions' to describe the family of professions who provide psychological therapies and interventions. This new term is now widely used and supported by the disparate range of psychological professionals, and has contributed to creating a larger voice and identity for the psychological professions.
Alongside this, Gita developed an internal staff wellbeing package, 'Looking after me looking after you', which was delivered to more than 100 staff, and has contributed to staff wellbeing projects in other mental health trusts. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Gita led on the development of a staff wellbeing resilience hub for Lancashire and South Cumbria.
Since 2009, she has worked in a specialist post-traumatic stress disorder service, which is currently the only NICE-compliant provider of therapy for this disorder in the north of England.
Gita said:
I’m honoured and humbled and delighted to receive the Award for Distinguished Contribution to Practice from the BPS. While the award is for one person, it’s important to recognise the parts that colleagues, friends and family have played in enabling my work over the years.