‘If there was tech that could speed up my job, I would always embrace that’

How did you become interested in neuropsychology and brain injury rehabilitation?

My undergraduate degree was in psychology and neuroscience at the University of Liverpool. I chose it because I've always had a fascination with the brain and the brain-mind-body connection, how it manifests and how behaviours are influenced by what's happening in the brain. During my degree I thought that clinical psychology seemed right for me – I was interested in doing the actual psychological work. I always liked the modules about working with people and different conditions and difficulties. I didn't know much about clinical psychology then, so was unaware how competitive it was to get onto training, which in a way was quite nice – I went into it with a very open mind and without feeling it was insurmountable.

After my undergraduate degree I had a couple of roles as an assistant psychologist, one of which was in a brain injury rehabilitation centre. That's where I fell in love with this specialty and with working with this client group. It encompassed all my interests: you do practical and therapeutic work, but it also incorporates the neuroscience side. Brain injuries affect individuals across the lifespan so you also do lots of family work, working with teams, consultation and supervision – all this systemic stuff, which is something I really like about neuropsychology. It was a great service, and a lot of the people I worked with there I still work with now – 20 or so years later.

Where did you start clinical training?

Back at the University of Liverpool in 2005. In my third year I chose to do my specialist placement at Royal Manchester Children's Hospital in the neuropsychology department. By then I had a sense that this was where my interest lay – I did a 12-month specialist placement there and absolutely loved it. I did a combination of neuropsychology work – lots of testing and cognitive rehabilitation advice – but also parenting skills training and family therapy.

Once I graduated I worked in community CAMHS and also at the University of Manchester as a part-time lecturer, a role I took on because I really missed academia and I'm passionate about teaching and training. I love research and supervising students. I was the deputy Academic Director while I was at Manchester, and I chaired one of the university ethics committees.

Alongside that role, I started my own private practice and started working on getting my qualification for the QiCN (Qualification in Clinical Neuropsychology) in my own time. I had a job in London at Guy's and St Thomas' at the Evelina Children's Hospital in a specialist service for tics and Tourette's Syndrome, which was amazing. Eventually it became difficult splitting my time between Manchester and London, so I ended up moving back to Manchester and focusing solely on neuropsychology in my own practice.

How did you come to develop Goal Manager?

I come from a really long line of engineers – my dad was an engineer, his dad was an engineer, my two brothers are in technology and engineering. I've been around tech a lot. I used to look at how my brothers worked in their roles, at how processes can be automated and sped up and how so many other industries were streets ahead of what was happening in health. If there was tech that could speed up my job, I would always embrace that.

Goal Manager came about because there are not many paediatric neuropsychologists around. There's fewer than 50 of us in the country on the specialist register. It's not a very accessible profession. As a result I was looking at how I could automate parts of what I do from an administrative and strategic point of view to free up more time to spend one on one with people.

I had an amazing assistant psychologist at the time who was also very forward thinking. We were having a chat one day and I was talking about goal setting and how cumbersome it was – I had to do it all on spreadsheets and Word documents, everyone sends you information in different formats, which makes it difficult and time-consuming to get a cohesive picture of how people are doing and what works for them and what doesn't. We decided to try to design a tech solution to help us track goal setting better. We initially built Goal Manager to be used in-house to speed up that process for us and eliminate some of the admin and paperwork. It quickly became apparent that it could be helpful to other services.

In 2019 we submitted it for a new award from the UK Acquired Brain Injury Forum – the Mike Barnes Award for Innovation. We were successful, and since then it's taken on a life of its own.

Through my passion for Goal Manager and things that speed up administration I have realised that the solutions to a lot of the problems we have within health services lie within the clinicians and users of those services. However, although many people have got great ideas, it can be a struggle to get them over the line. It is so difficult and expensive and nebulous it is entirely understandable that people give up.

I feel like I've found a route through all that, and now I have a real passion for empowering others to pursue their own ideas, to be able to think about how they can develop them and get them into market and improve services from the bottom up rather than the top down. The way it works now, tech solutions tend to be imposed on services by companies who don't really understand our priorities and needs on the ground.

How did you feel to win the Women in Innovation Award and what do you plan to do with the money?

I was blown away, because I've never entered anything like this before. I'm very much a jobbing clinician. I run a successful service which is also a business, but actually I don't know a lot about the commercial world and about building products and marketing products. We were fortunate to have the opportunity to collaborate with Health Innovation Manchester, who are part of the national Academic Health Science Network (AHSN) who support with businesses who are innovating in the health space. We were later introduced to Innovate, the Government's innovation agency, who are also tasked with supporting innovative businesses to grow.

It was a wonderful feeling to see all the work you've put in over the years culminating in that kind of acknowledgement. It's not just a grant, it's an award celebrating being a woman working to improve people's lives. Having some acknowledgement of that and how far we've come with Goal Manager was great!

The original plan for Goal Manager was for it to be a workflow management tool – you could put in all the data about rehabilitation, all the parameters, goals which are being set and when they're being met. All that information gets organised and can be automatically reported on. But what would be even more useful would be to develop a data dashboard to help us look at that data in numerous ways – on an individual basis or service basis or even wider if you're running a bigger study. And that's what we're doing with the award.

There are a lot of questions about rehabilitation which we can't answer because we lack the data sets, but this new data dashboard will summarise key metrics and statistics from the dataset. We can then use that data to inform treatment at an individual level, but also at a group level. We could start to think about what works for whom, what goals people set, what sort of difficulties people tend to have, what sort of challenges and barriers get in the way of things and what things facilitate their rehabilitation, how long it takes people to move through rehabilitation and what variables influence this. The Data Dashboard will allow us to pull up these metrics and statistics at the click of a button, making it much easier to use the data to guide clinical decision-making and service design. With billions of people around the world having conditions requiring rehabilitation that would benefit from such data, we are excited to have the support of the award to do this work. Before we design the Dashboard we will first be running focus groups to seek the views of stakeholders (service users, clinicians, researchers) continuing our model of co-design that is at the core of everything we do.