Sarah has over thirty years’ experience working in local and national quality and service improvement roles within the NHS including research, innovation, NICE and clinical audit. In 2021, Sarah widened her portfolio becoming lead for the Dorset Innovation Hub.
Sarah is Lead for the Dorset Innovation Hub and Head of Innovation working on behalf of the Integrated Care System (NHS Dorset). Sarah is responsible for the strategic oversight, partnership working and delivery of the Dorset Innovation Hub. The Dorset Innovation Hub is a place-based partnership that draws together partner organisations to provide expertise to spread and adopt prioritised innovation across Dorset.
Sarah has a proactive, pragmatic, reflective and collaborative style. Her expertise and experience lie in project management with key focus on consideration of ‘pull in the system’, sustainable implementation, capacity and capability and supporting and enabling staff to undertake priority projects using the ‘right approach, involving the right people, right tool and at the right time’. Sarah’s key focus is on ensuring service users and key stakeholders are at the heart of the delivery of quality of care. Sarah uses a system wide thinking approach through the golden thread of quality including: research, innovation, improvement, clinical audit, quality improvement and National Institute of Clinical Excellence programmes.
Through facilitation Sarah and her team encourage the review and use of the ‘right approach, involving the right people, right tool and at the right time’ to enable staff to undertake a benefits realisation review of the quality of care provided and ensure that actions are undertaken to improve service user care where necessary. Sarah considers that improvement is integral to all health and care staffs’ roles and this is central to strengthening the culture of improvement and to improving service users experience and outcomes.
Sarah has a BA in Post Compulsory Education (Southampton University (2006)), completed the Ashridge NIHR Leadership Programme (2017), and until recently held a Teaching Faculty Associate for the NHS England Quality, Service Improvement and Redesign (QSIR) programme. Sarah is undertaking her doctoral research with Bournemouth University entitled – Critical Realist study exploring the sustainability of patient experience focused quality initiatives in healthcare settings.
Sarah has previously been the principal investigator for the research study “An evaluation of a real-time survey for improving patients’ experiences of the relational aspects of care (After Francis)” and was coordinator at Poole for the research study “Preventable Incidents, Survival and Mortality Study 2 (PRISM2)”.
Sarah is a visiting fellow with the Centre for Workforce Systems and Innovation (CWSI), Health Sciences University, and a visiting associate with the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences, Bournemouth University.