Anne-marie Barrell

I am currently a nurse within the health facilitation team at Leeds ad York Partnership Foundation Trust. The team works strategically to address health inequalities for people with a learning disability. This involves working closely with other professionals, supporting them to improve their practice for patients with a learning disability. Day-to-day, this might be supporting staff withing general practice in learning disability awareness, reasonable adjustments and mental capacity, developing easy read information or working with other professionals within the trust, supporting them to care for patients with a learning disability who are accessing mainstream mental health services.

I believe the programme will improve my confidence in building relationships with other professionals and also begin to develop my leadership skills, which will in turn benefit the team where I work. Working together effectively ultimately benefits the patients for whom we are caring, both directly in how care is delivered, and also indirectly, in how services are structured and commissioned. I would like to have more knowledge around leading and implementing change within healthcare services and feel that this programme will be beneficial. The networking opportunities will enable me to learn from others and share knowledge and learning from different care settings and perspectives to develop my practice.