A Visiting Lecturer at The University of Hertfordshire, I lead BEING MORTAL, a campaign which supports us all to celebrate life and acknowledge, talk about and plan for death, dying and grieving.  This is important because if we acknowledge and talk about these things now it makes it less traumatic for ourselves and others when the time comes.   It also allows us to exercise agency in our life until its end.  My recent publications explore how to foster agential leadership and positive self-image in individuals with a life-limiting illness through facilitating their leadership of a change which matters to them. I’m particularly interested in exploring patients’ production and use of comics as a development and evaluation tool, to reveal the complexity of living with long-term illness and to support their change leadership activity.

Current research interests include:

• palliative care
• patient change leadership
• comics as a tool to support activism
• arts-based methodologies

• Practice-based research at post-graduate level
• Arts-based approaches to palliative care
• Patient leadership in palliative care