For organisations
Specialist maternity expertise. Wider healthcare relevance.
Independent consultancy for organisations working to improve patient experience, safety, service design and learning.
My deepest expertise is in maternity — a high-risk, high-emotion, highly scrutinised area of healthcare where failures of listening, communication and trust can have profound consequences. The principles extend well beyond it. I help organisations understand people's experiences as evidence about how systems work, and where they fail.
Who I work with
NHS trusts & maternity services
Responding to national reviews, external scrutiny, recurring complaints, fragmented feedback, pathway pressures, or a need to demonstrate that listening leads to improvement.
Health-tech & AI companies
Needing credible clinical challenge, a clearer NHS use case, responsible product design, safety thinking, workflow insight or a stronger understanding of patient experience.
Maternal-health platforms & app developers
Creating antenatal, intrapartum or postnatal information, support and care pathways that must be clinically sound, trauma-informed and genuinely useful to women and families.
Integrated care, policy & improvement organisations
Requiring maternity expertise, independent analysis, stakeholder engagement, policy contribution, or the translation of national priorities into practical models.
Research, education & professional bodies
For qualitative research, evaluation, expert input, educational design, conference speaking and knowledge mobilisation.
Legal, resolution & risk organisations
Connecting claims, complaints, incidents and family experience; improving responses after harm; and identifying opportunities for earlier resolution and prevention.
The questions I help answer
- Are women and families able to tell us what matters — and are we hearing the right things?
- Can we show how experience intelligence influences safety, governance and improvement?
- What do our complaints, incidents, surveys and qualitative accounts reveal when considered together?
- Where are people falling through gaps between services, teams or datasets?
- Is our pathway evidence-informed, safe, equitable and workable?
- What would an effective birth conversation, birth planning or family liaison model look like here?
- Does this technology solve a meaningful NHS problem and fit clinical practice?
- What claims can we responsibly make about our product or programme?
- How should we evaluate whether a change has made care safer or better?
- How do we prepare staff for difficult conversations without reducing compassion to a script?
How I work
Listen closely
I start by understanding the decision the work needs to inform, not by imposing a predetermined product.
Connect different forms of evidence
Lived experience, qualitative accounts, operational data, complaints, incidents, national standards, research and professional knowledge.
Look at the system around the problem
Pathways, interfaces, incentives, culture, governance and practical delivery, rather than locating failure solely in an individual or team.
Make the work usable
Every engagement is designed around a useful output: a diagnostic, roadmap, service specification, evaluation framework, training package, decision brief or clearly defined next step.
Retain humanity and rigour
Trauma-informed and restorative principles shape how I engage with people; they don't replace honest analysis, appropriate challenge or accountability.
Ways to work together
Projects are scoped around the question, the evidence available and the output required. Work may take the form of:
- A focused diagnostic or review
- A fixed-scope design or evaluation project
- A facilitated workshop or development programme
- Advisory sessions at key stages of a product or programme
- An ongoing retained advisory relationship
- A keynote, panel, webinar or policy contribution
Where the scope is sufficiently clear, I provide a fixed project fee. Longer or evolving work may be structured in phases or through a monthly advisory retainer. Organisational fees aren't published, because a short independent review and a multi-stage implementation partnership require very different levels of work.
Tell me what you're working on.
If you can describe the decision you're facing or the change you want, I can help you shape a proportionate piece of work around it.
Discuss what you need