‘The world needs health psychologists’

I noticed that in your welcome to the Annual Conference this morning, you were quite self-deprecating, downplaying your profile. 
I don't think I'm downplaying it, it's just that there are quite a few big names in health psychology and it's important to acknowledge where I sit and what I have to bring. I've been in this sphere for 20 years now, and I do make an impact, but I'm more of a 'team science' than a big ripple kind of person. I do bring passion and strong leadership skills to the table.

I wonder if that says something interesting about the Division, though, that the same people have come back to the conference year after year, including big names in the field. 
Absolutely. There are those people that are our foundation, the veterans in this space. But there are also so many younger people that are coming through, the early career researchers who are being supported in this environment. I think it is a really nice conference to come to. People do feel like they can interact and be part of it and learn from people who have been around for a long time, and are still very engaged and have a lot to bring.

From what I've seen, you've made a special effort on social media to set out how people starting out on their journey in psychology can make the most of the conference, and why they don't need to feel intimidated.
No one wants to come to a conference, on their own, leave on their own, and they don't really know who to have dinner with. It's a great opportunity to network, and so much of what we do from an academic perspective is about the networks that we have. They lead to other opportunities. So this is a brilliant environment for people at a very early stage of their career to meet some seasoned people that will offer them support and guidance. That's how you move forward, and that's how the discipline has grown – a core bunch of very supportive people that helped other people grow into this discipline.

Tell me about that growth. 
The number of trainees that are coming through has grown significantly. Those routes through to health psychology are much better established now than they than they used to be. But I think that some of it is just about the types of people that health psychology draws into it. You've got a whole bunch of people that want to make a change in people's lives. They want to do something impactful. They want to do something meaningful. That spills out into nurturing the next generation of scientists, researchers, and people in practice as well. Over the years more people in clinical practice have come along to the conference too. It's much more of a shared environment nowadays. We need to keep both of those things moving forward, because they're both so important terms of what health psychology is.

Psychology is a hub science, but health psychology perhaps feels like a hub within a hub – there are people here at the conference who are into psychobiology, or clinical, or occupational, or coaching…  there are a lot of links with different areas.
You'll find health psychologists in multidisciplinary teams, but also in 'team science'. They might be the person that brings the intervention, or they might be the person that provides the statistics for something or develops the scale to measure whatever. Quite a lot of people have a core aspect to the work that they do, but also quite eclectic CVs where they've worked across a variety of different disciplines with other people to input health psychology expertise into that world.

Tell me about your area.
I started my PhD in 2000. At that time, the routes into health psychology weren't as well established. I did my PhD on quality of life in Huntington's disease, developing a quality of life measure for spousal caregivers of Huntington's disease patients, under the supervision of Heather Buchanan.

At that time, you had to do a masters, now known as stage one,and then because my PhD was supervised by a health psychologist that gave me a grandparenting route into health psychology. I didn't have to do the stage two qualification that people have to do now: in some ways that was a shame, because I think they get a lot out of it and have a better grounding than I did.

I had a real interest in quantity versus quality of life. What's more important to people? That's where my career started, and then I've inputted into scale development around quality of life in a variety of areas. Parkinson's, Multiple Sclerosis, but also more recently working with people in terms of suicide prevention tools, and also children and young people with different kinds of health conditions. So quite often, what I find I do is input that scale development aspect into a larger bid. And the other side of what I do is academic leadership. That works really well for me: inputting into research, and then supporting other people in terms of developing them for PhDs, or leadership in my own school at the University of Nottingham. I've been there since 2005. I only went there for a couple of years!

I only went to the BPS for four, max… that was 23 years ago. 
What are you finding in terms of that quantity versus quality question?
From the work that I've done over the last 20 years, I think predominantly people value quality of life. It's a really interesting flip. If you're just asked the question, when you haven't got a health condition, people think about living a long life. But actually when people are facing pain and other aspects of chronic illness, then having a good life for the time that you've got seems to come much more to the forefront. There's something quite clarifying for people who are facing either a terminal illness or a shortened lifespan because of their condition, or limits in terms of what they can physically do or achieve. It changes the way that people think. When people have got a health condition, they predominantly start looking at 'how do I make the most of my life as it is? How do I get the best quality out of it?' I find that fascinating.

Isn't there also research on spinal injury, areas like that, suggesting that people adapt and end up being happier and with a better quality of life than they might have predicted? 
Well, yes, one of the issues with measuring quality of life is that people readjust. What you considered would be a good quality of life for you at one point, if you're faced with health conditions and issues, then you adjust and your bar changes. Your quality of life might dip, but then come back up again. As individuals, we tend to adapt. But there is something about really valuing life and being in the present when you're living with life-limiting conditions.

What are your plans for the Division for the next year or so?
I want to get out to the membership more. As a committee, we're working really, really hard. But I think there's a gap between what the membership can actually see and what we're doing and trying to achieve. So I'd like to start doing some of our committee meetings in public so people can join online and listen to what we actually talk about, and understand how the decisions are made. I'd like to get out and do some listening events. In the BPS, there are all these different areas where people gather, but we don't seem to overlap very much so working across the Divisions and Branches and building those relationships is going to be really important in making us more visible.

…the perennial challenge! Working across member networks. I did think that the branches were the absolute key to that. But perhaps post-Covid, with more online events, there's less need to localise?
But there is definitely a place for face-to-face meetings. There's something that you get out of actually being in physical contact with people that you can't quite get from being online.

You know, I'm really pleased that the conference seems to be going well, and that we have got lots of people here, but we need to get out more. So that we know what the membership want, and then we can move forward our priorities. There's so much to do, and we can't do it all because everyone's a volunteer. It's all being done around the edges of people's day job. So a clear idea of the priorities for the membership and how we're going to achieve those, that's really important. That includes a longer term plan, post-Covid. Everything went into an online mode and we're coming out of that now but we've got to figure out how everything works, when people are still quite pandemic fatigued.

Health psychology had such impact during that time, in terms of rapid responses and practical input. 
There's a lot to do. The world needs health psychologists.

Do you see that identity continuing to strengthen? There are some areas of psychology where it becomes a bit more diffuse, people stop calling themselves that type of psychologist…
I think yes. But I don't think we can take it for granted. We have got a clear identity, and I think that that will continue to grow. With the pandemic, it's very clear what the role of health psychology and health psychologists is in terms of global and public health. But I don't think we can take that for granted. We still have to bang the drum and let people know how important the work that we do is.

- See also our Health Psychology Collection, and report from day one of the annual conference.