‘What I love is supporting other people to be absolutely brilliant’

Since I spoke with you last June, you've moved to the University of Surrey, as Head of the School of Health sciences. I think there are only one or two other psychologists in that department, as far as I can tell. What sort of challenges has that brought with it?

The school that I'm heading up has got health professional courses in it – Nursing, Midwifery, Paramedic Science, Physician Associates as well, and then a whole bunch of psychological intervention stuff at a postgraduate and a CPD level. We have two issues I think, in the health sciences domain. One is around students coming to university, and how appealing these types of courses are for people at the moment. We've moved from clapping our NHS colleagues out on the streets during the pandemic to a place where many of them do not feel valued. People will perhaps inevitably question whether they even want to come to do these types of courses. And the second issue is how to best support the NHS long-term plan. We need  to support NHSE to deliver on that but, ensuring our programmes and courses meet their needs can be a difficult thing. The speed with which NHS Trusts want to move in terms of educating some of their staff, and the speed at which universities move in terms of getting new programs up and running, are an entirely different thing. You can't always provide what people what people want and the pace required. 

One of the things that we've got at Surrey, which is a really good thing, is that the undergraduate program is an integrated one – you've got nursing, midwifery and paramedic science undergraduate students, and they are all taught together. They do have their profession specific work, but they also do a large amount of their undergraduate training together, which allows them to work inter-professionally from the off. That's really exciting, but not without its challenges as well, in terms of breaking down those silos at an early stage. We draw on a lot of psychology to get students to think about professional identity and culture and to understand why they do the things they do and why they behave in the ways that they do.

Do you think your colleagues are seeing you as an appropriate 'hub' person, as a psychologist and as head of school? And psychology as a suitable centre for it all?

I certainly hope so, and I think so. I've had lots of conversations with, you know, CEOs in different NHS Trusts across the region over the last four weeks, and a lot of them have commented that it's really interesting that the university wanted to appoint a psychologist to head up a School of Health Sciences. 

They thought it was valuable and important – thinking about human factors and behaviour, and those soft skills around how you support and develop other people. Psychology and psychologists can bring a lot to leadership. It's nice to be in that space where people value what you do, and don't say, 'oh, but you're not a nurse, and you're heading up a school that's educating a lot of nurses.' I think we've moved a long way from that.

Around that, I know you'd like to see changes in how Psychology is talked about in recruitment, and in how roles are advertised.

Absolutely. In terms of recruitment to roles, both clinically and in other areas, the 'profession-specific' aspects of psychologists' role are good in terms of the public understanding of what skills we've got and how we can implement those. But that also puts up artificial silos in terms of the jobs that we could do, either in academia or in professional practice. You see roles coming out for clinical psychologists or counselling psychologists, and they're about behavior change in pain management for example. This is health psychologists' bread and butter. It's what we do every single day. Moving towards that more 'Practitioner Psychologist' approach would be a massive step forward. Define what the skills are within a job spec, within the criteria. Then an applicant can look at it and go, 'OK, actually, I can't do those things', and not put themselves forward for it. That is very different from being excluded because you haven't gone down a particular route in terms of your qualifications.

Whenever we've covered this in the magazine, it's been a case of gradual education of recruiters. It's not about one area of Psychology encroaching on another's 'territory' – the central message is that recruiters may be missing out on the most skilled candidates. It makes sense, but it does seem that the wheels turn very slowly.

Yes. I do a lot of work with the Trusts and people that are supporting our students on placement, and I'm a governor at one of the local hospitals. You speak to people and they say, 'We've got a clinical psychologist vacancy, and we've had it for eight months'. I ask, 'What's your clinical psychologist going to be doing?' And they start talking about behavior change, they start talking about motivation, and you're just thinking, 'have you thought about advertising for health psychologists, or simply a practitioner psychologist?' We need to understand and value the expertise of different areas, where we overlap, and where our skills and expertise differ as well.

Are you still getting to do research in the new role? When I was in academia, a very long time ago, the view of Head of School seemed to be 'You have to take your turn, but don't expect to get anything else done while you were doing it'. Has that changed? 

It can be a bit like that… these roles expand to what you make them, don't they? You could work all hours and say that there's no time to do anything else. 

For me, one of my skills is around people, and supporting other people. I'm good at what I do. I'm a good enough researcher, I'm a good enough teacher. But what I love is supporting other people to be brilliant. That's the thing that really motivates me. So being a Head of School is a nice role for me, because I get to do that all the time with lots of people.

I am doing a little bit of research, though. I am on a Research for Patient Benefit grant that's just been funded, looking at skin ulcers. There's some evidence that different skin colours are more susceptible and more at risk to pressure sores and ulcers, if you've got a child that's bed bound. My role is to be the methodologist. It's not an area of expertise of mine, but I'm bringing the psychometrics to that study. And we've just submitted a large Wellcome Discovery Grant where I'm a partner-applicant, and if that comes off I'll be delivering some clinical supervision to the researchers in that environment. So I'm taking on slightly different research roles but they still give me opportunities for publication. A little dabble.

I love 'supporting other people to be absolutely brilliant'. Hopefully, that's one reason why you're keen to come on board in a voluntary capacity with The Psychologist, as an Associate Editor around Health Psychology.

Absolutely. It's an opportunity to think about what areas people might want to know about, what might be useful to people, to contribute, to be of service to the community. 

Photo: Kate Granger Building, C University of Surrey