Helen Greatorex is Chief Executive of Kent And Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust. Prior to her appointment in 2016, she had been Executive director of nursing in Sussex for over fourteen years.
Qualifying as a Registered Mental Health Nurse (RMN) in 1987, Helen worked clinically across a wide range of settings, and specialised in mental health rehabilitation. She was a founder member of the rehabilitation services in Brighton in the early 1990s, creating what would become a forerunner of the national Assertive Outreach model of care. In 2018 Helen graduated as a Florence Nightingale Leadership Scholar and continues to mentor and coach others as a result.
Here she talks to Robin Staveley about dealing with the size and the scale of this pandemic, how it magnifies what is already good or bad and the opportunity it now provides to improve, inform and shake up the way we work. In Helen’s words, we are ‘watching history being made’ and her hope is that the outstanding response from all NHS workers and carers will remain a cause for celebration and inform future investment strategies.