This Is Me: range of jobs in early work life ranging from accountancy, minimal people contact to TV and creating on air promotions, plenty of people contact. Eventually the people aspect became my thing so I went into teaching which led me into counselling and then mentoring students with mental health issues at university. Teaching / counselling involved elements of volunteering / placement hours so volunteering was almost normal for me and the experiences gained were invaluable.

Personal life events meant that almost overnight my world became one of hospitals, care homes and elderly care issues in general and so once I’d navigated my way through, without any form of satnav!, the role of Patient Partner for Care of the Elderly seemed a perfect fit. I’m passionate about elderly people and their experiences both lived experience, past , and their place in a society which is forever changing, present/ future. One of my mottos is courtesy of Soren Kierkegaard, philosopher, who said that ‘life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards’ and for me embraces both what was but also what is. I’m passionate about elderly care both now and in the future and I’m keen to encourage future elderly generations to be more proactive in their own health because 70 is the new 50 and people now have greater access to general health information. Practising what I preach,  I’ve always been into health and fitness and strongly believe in the notion of Move it or Lose it. I’m one of Havering’s health champions and I’m planning to qualify as a fitness instructor for over 65’s in August this year. I’m a huge fan of the TV show Greys  Anatomy and in times of doubt sometimes wonder, ‘What would Christina Yang do ?’. I’m also far too easily distracted by Twitter !

To finish, I’ll use another phrase from

my counselling theory courtesy of the person-centred guru Carl Rogers, which simply says that we are ‘always becoming ‘

In a very tiny nutshell, that’s me