'As clinical director, I am delighted to support Wound Care Today, leading the development of the clinical programme and spending time with colleagues who are passionate about improving the life of those with, or at risk of, wounds. The blend of practical and theoretical sessions, personal development and real life experience will stimulate and inspire us all in our day-to-day practice.'
Remote area nursing in the Torres Straits Islands during the mid-1990s fired up Helen's passion for wound care. While there, she cared for locals with infected tropical wounds and many diabetic foot ulcers. On return to the UK, she actively pursued a career within tissue viability, and has had an enjoyable and rewarding career to date. She has held clinical, research and leadership positions within the NHS; and the tissue viability work her teams have undertaken has been recognised through three national awards.
Within wound care, she has worked as a lone TVN across a number of acute hospitals and has also lead tissue viability services. Having held both consultant tissue viability nurse and executive director of nursing roles within the NHS, and worked within the wound care industry, she now provides consultancy within the NHS, private sector and commercial organisations.
Helen holds a substantive position as lead nurse for wound care pathways within an NHS provider organisation in England, maintaining an active role in improving safety, patient and staff experience and clinical outcomes.
Paul Vaughan
Chair, Wound Care Today
Deputy director, Primary Care Nursing and NextGen Nurse
Paul works with NHS England as the deputy director – Primary Care Nursing and NextGen Nurse. Previously, Paul was a director of nursing, transformation within the organisation. Currently, the focus of his role is on general practice nursing and leading the national initiative on the perception of nursing known as NextGen Nurse.
Paul led the development and implementation of the 'GPN Ten Point Plan' and continues to work to ensure the voice and contribution of general practice nursing is valued and further developed in the new NHS system architecture.
Through the NextGen Programme, Paul led the schools work which encourages young people from all walks of life to take up nursing as their career of choice. He also leads work that through an evidence-based programme enables executive white leaders to build equity in the NHS through their sponsorship of nurses from the Global Majority. This enables nurses from the Global Majority to advance their careers and be appointed to very senior NHS leadership positions.
Paul has completed a Masters in Management with the University of Liverpool and his dissertation focused on the factors that enable nursing staff to raise concerns in their workplace.
Clare Anvar
Clinical massage specialist; clinical therapy advisor, Lipoedema UK
Clare has been a clinical massage and manual lymphatic drainage (MLD) therapist since 2004, specialising in all types of chronic pain, post-surgical recovery and disorders of the lymphatic system.
She is skilled and committed to delivering exemplary care for patients, who remain her inspiration, tutors and guides. Clare works closely with consultants and surgeons to speed recovery or to stabilise and maintain chronic conditions. She has extensive experience with complex cases and from many types of short and long-term surgical recovery; oncology, orthopaedics, reconstructive and cosmetic, and works with all UK insurance companies.
Alongside her private practice, she has studied and worked within different clinical environments. From 2004–2008, she delivered therapies for an HIV charity, where she became a trustee to formulate and deliver HIV awareness training, while studying a foundation degree in complementary approaches to health at Thames Valley University. She also worked for a local cancer charity providing manual lymphatic drainage and complementary therapies. From 2008–2011, she became a complementary therapist in cancer services at University College London hospital (UCLH), while studying a BSc (Hons) Health Sciences; remedial massage and neuromuscular therapy at Westminster University. She then studied an MSc in complementary medicine at Westminster, which was completed in 2015, while working as a clinical massage therapist for Horder Healthcare, who specialise in orthopaedic surgeries.
She presented a poster of her dissertation on lymphoedema management at the British Lymphology Society (BLS) conference in 2015. This narrowed her focus and she began to specialise more closely on lymphoedema and lipoedema. She continued to train in advanced lymphoedema management and three types of MLD. In the last few years, she has developed and teaches a method of kinesiology taping to speed post-surgical recovery. She works part-time from the clinic of a reconstructive and plastic surgeon, looking after post-surgical patients. She also now writes academic articles and presents at international conferences. More recently, in January 2023, she became the clinical therapy advisor to Lipoedema UK and a member of the expert panel for Lymphoedema United in January 2024.
Emma Holly
Educator and clinical scar specialist, Restore Therapy Ltd
Emma Holly is a leading clinical specialist in manual scar tissue treatment. She has been heading a campaign to improve awareness on scar care after injury and surgery. She has a clinical practice at Ten Harley Street — London’s most famous street for health professionals. Emma is a speaker on scar care and scar massage at conferences and symposiums to therapists and medical professionals around the world. She has presented at conferences, including the international Scars2023 in Berlin, the Australasian Lymphology Symposium Auckland, New Zealand in 2023, and the Association of Breast Surgery Conference 2024 in Bournemouth, UK. Emma and her teaching team provide education around the world for health and wellbeing professionals to improve outcomes for people with scarring.
Harriet Beveridge
Harriet brings a unique blend of experience: She is author of the bestselling book: ‘Will It Make The Boat Go Faster? Olympic-Winning Strategies for Everyday Success’ and has over twenty years' experience helping individuals and teams achieve exceptional performance whilst also thriving.
She also brings academic rigour - her current MSc at Kings College London is on the neuroscience and psychology of mental health.
Last, but not least, Harriet is an accomplished stand up comic. She has appeared on BBC Radio 4 and TED.com talking about the power of humour to raise wellbeing and performance; she was a Funny Women Award UK semi-finalist and has taken four shows to the Edinburgh Fringe.
Harriet's keynotes are hugely entertaining and inspiring, but also practical. Delegates will walk away with a spring in their step and a toolkit of strategies they can use immediately.
Jacqui Hughes
Senior healthcare outcomes manager, Smith & Nephew; senior fellow, Higher Education Academy
Jacqui Hughes is a senior healthcare outcomes manager leading higher-level data generation and analytics across the UK, Ireland, and the Nordics, with a particular focus on value-based healthcare, the urgency of wound care, and patient quality of life. Jacqui has worked in the med tech industry for 13 years in a variety of clinically focused roles. Prior to that, Jacqui worked as a registered nurse from 1987 and has held various clinical/leadership/strategic operational roles within the NHS. Jacqui lectures for the Open University and is a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Naseer Ahmad
Consultant vascular sSurgeon, Manchester University Foundation Trust; clinical director, Manchester Amputation Reduction Strategy (MARS) and Greater Manchester Aneurysm Screening Programme; former deputy chief clinical information officer
Naseer is a vascular surgeon based at Manchester University Foundation Trust. He performs the full range of vascular procedures, including carotid, aneurysm and venous surgery but specialises in complex lower limb surgery that prevents an amputation. He is the clinical director of both the Manchester Amputation Reduction Strategy (The MARS Project) and the Greater Manchester & East Cheshire Aneurysm Screening Programme and a former deputy chief clinical information officer of his hospital. His award-winning research interest is the inequality surrounding lower limb amputations which led to developing The MARS Project. This project has resulted in a 46% reduction in amputation prevalence over six years in a pilot site of 220,000 people. This work is currently being scaled up for three million people. His cross-sectoral roles are now enabling him to develop ‘whole systems’ pathways, i.e. those that harmonise public health, community and hospital services for patients with vascular disease. His aim is to bring together and digitise siloed NHS services and is working with leaders across Manchester’s academic, clinical, strategic, financial and digital areas to drive this forward.
Stephanie Lowen
National self-management specialist, director, Self Management Consulting Ltd
I , Stephanie lowen am a self-management specialist, what you ask? Well let me tell you how I got here. Five years ago I developed a team in Leeds focusing on self-management — this was for all clinical tasks in the community, not just wounds. The data soon exceeded all expectations and we were discharging 133+ individuals each month, which was around 3000+ visits saved for our community teams. I didn’t stop there, I then approached our acute trusts who again saw a reduction in bed-stays. As you can imagine this sparked a great deal of interest, and with my clinical and psychological knowledge I created an education package that soon hit 11 NHS organisations who also saw the results we had in Leeds. I have now had my self-management 4-tier model published and hope to support as many organisations as possible to free some capacity and begin to ‘breathe. in this firefighting system we have become.
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