Profile

I live in London but I am actually from Germany. I moved to the UK in 2008 to study psychology. I love meeting new people and I am passionate about improving health care. Studying psychology opens a lot of doors, so for a few years I worked with people with severe mental illness, to help improve their health through therapy and then on a research study to improving mental health treatment. I am now working on a study to improve the experience of being in hospital for mental health reasons.

Here is a picture of my first conference poster!

In my spare time I am all about exploring:

I love travelling

I manage a research study which aims to improve the experience of being discharged from a mental health inpatient ward. Some people can be in hospital for months, and many people find it difficult to settle back into life at home. We hope to improve this. We therefore interview people who have been in hospital for mental health reasons, health care staff and carers, as well as visiting hospitals. We will then design a new and improved way of hospital discharge. The last part of the research study will test our new way of discharge – 6 hospitals have agreed to try it out, and we will interview staff and people in hospital to find out what they think.

I usually start my day around 8.30 with some emails. We usually have a few team meetings in the day, to discuss how the study is doing (whether we are on time, what outstanding tasks there are). We also have meetings to discuss the research analysis and findings, and meetings with the other participating universities. I may then conduct 1 or 2 interviews with staff or service users for the research. I also supervise Research Assistants, who also work on the interviews, the design phase and complete ward visits. I mainly work from home, but we all meet up every month in person for workshops. I usually finish around 5pm.