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Consultancy & advisory
The ward and the machine, in one pair of hands. Sixteen years as a mental health nurse, twenty-five in health, and a framework built for the moment AI joins the team — applied to yours.
Why this, and why me
Most advice on AI in care comes from one side of the problem. Technologists know the system and guess at the ward; clinicians know the ward and guess at the system. The guessing is where deployments fail. I have spent sixteen years in mental health nursing — from healthcare assistant to registered nurse, on the shifts where safety is actually decided — and twenty-five years in the health sector in all. Alongside that sits a lifetime at the command line, the open-access Heartbeat Framework, and research that continues in public.
The premise of all of it is simple: deployment risk is capability multiplied by culture. Regulation looks hard at the first term. I help you look at the second — before a system amplifies it.
Two ways to work together
Consultancy for organisations bringing AI into care. Advisory for teams whose culture decides whether anything they adopt is safe.
For NHS and independent providers, commissioners, and the companies building for them. Readiness before deployment, clinical safety through it, and evidence after it: the gate, the oversight design, the measures and the record — drawn from the framework’s eight instruments and fitted to your service.
For leaders of teams where the work is high-stakes and round the clock — in health and beyond. The team as the unit of safety: handover, supervision, the discretion people quietly exercise, and how to keep all of it when new members, human or machine, join the shift.
What the work can look like
- Readiness review. Before a system goes live: can this service deploy it safely, and what must be true first? Built on the Readiness Gate — the one instrument whose honest answer can be “not yet”.
- Clinical safety, alongside the regulations. Where DCB0129 and device regulation assess the system, I assess the organisation receiving it: the culture term the frameworks leave out.
- Oversight that works on a real shift. Designing the seat for the person supervising AI — authority, information, time and retained skill — so oversight is a role, not a signature.
- Measuring what happened. A structured trial on a real unit with no new software, read honestly, null results included.
- Team culture and handover. For teams with or without AI: where information is lost, where supervision thins, and what the informal layer is quietly holding together.
- Talks and teaching. For boards, clinical leadership and staff groups who need the argument in an hour rather than a paper.
How it works
1. An enquiry. Tell me through the contact form what you are deploying, reviewing or wrestling with. 2. A conversation. We talk it through, and I will say plainly whether I am the right person. 3. A written scope. What will be done, by when, and what you will have at the end. 4. The work. With the findings in writing, yours to keep.
What stays free
The framework itself is not for sale. Every paper and instrument stays open access under CC BY 4.0, archived with its own DOI, and you are welcome to run all of it yourself. Consultancy and advisory are something different: time, judgement and clinical experience applied to your setting, by the person who wrote the framework.