Lucy Aldrich

Hello – I’m Lucy Aldrich and I’m excited to join the national enhance team as a clinical fellow and allied health professional. I’m based in Hull and worked for over 15 years in Rheumatology as a physiotherapist in an acute trust. 

I have worked in outpatients for over 25 years and I have learnt that the team I work with is just as important to me as the patients I treat. As a clinician in a busy department, I recognised how routine ways of supporting students on placement could become stressful for teams and educators. A desire to make my peers, and future colleagues, lives easier led me to develop a model of student support advocating peer learning called the Hull EASI model. Its local success in turn led me to take a secondment working collaboratively across multiple organisations and professions in the Humber and North Yorkshire region, exploring placement expansion during a very unstable period of time. This opportunity provided me with invaluable experience of the complexity of system working and an insight into the potential for positively influencing healthcare beyond clinical practise.

A highlight for me was working collaboratively with the Versus Arthritis charity and University of Hull to deliver role emergent placements in a rural coastal community who wanted physiotherapy input. The capacity to create opportunities for future therapists to work independently with a charity, identify and deliver sustainable interventions, influence the population health, and routinely address health inequalities was personally energising. The parallels between this experience and the Enhancing Generalist Skills programme are strikingly clear to me, as the programme seeks to empower health workers to embed these behaviours. 

As an individual living with a chronic health condition I am a patient in the system. This experience has shown me how important it is to recognise health beyond the context of NHS organisations. As the enhance programme is available to all it has a clear vision of how to unite and grow health workers equitably, absolving organisational hierarchies and professional backgrounds. It resonates with my AHP values that health is more than a diagnosis. By bringing the current workforce together to explore bigger issues, it cultivates behaviours of diversity, sustainability and inclusivity, and ultimately nurtures the health and wellbeing of ourselves and those we cherish.

A key motivator for AHPs is to align interventions specifically with patients’ values, enriching their health care experience. All too often I have heard of hindered outcomes due to limited local knowledge of service availability, and frustrations that improving pathways and healthcare lay beyond an individual’s scope of influence. The enhance programme has given me real hope that we can intrinsically address these frustrations by generating effective frameworks to bridge the grey areas outside clinical knowledge. By investing in the current multi-professional workforce, enhance empowers core health care workers to connect across systems, to manage population health effectively, and to minimise health inequalities in day to day practise. That’s an NHS I want to belong to.