Dr. Gail Kinman

Visiting Professor of Occupational Health Psychology, Birkbeck University of London, UK

Gail is Visiting Professor of Occupational Health Psychology at Birkbeck University of London and University of Nottingham. She is a Chartered Psychologist and a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and the Academy of Social Sciences. Gail has published widely in the field of occupational health psychology, with a particular interest in the wellbeing of people working in the ‘helping’ professions such as health and social care professionals. Her long standing collaboration with Dr. Louise Grant focuses on developing and evaluating multi-level interventions to enhance resilience, work-life balance and wellbeing in social care workers. She has published widely on this topic and designs and regularly delivers training to promote individual and organisational resilience in health and social care.

Gail is a Trustee of the Council for Work and Health and is on the editorial board of several high impact journals such as the British Medical Bulletin, Occupational Medicine and the International Journal of Stress Management. She has recently been commissioned by bodies such as the Society for Occupational Medicine, the Royal College of Nursing Foundation and Education Support to conduct national reviews of the work-related wellbeing of people working in healthcare and education.  Gail is working with several bodies, such as the Society of Occupational Medicine, Public Health England, the Ministry of Justice and Health Education England, on projects related to the health and wellbeing of employees in different sectors.  

Dr. Lisa Bostock

Principal Research Fellow, Institute of Applied Social Research (IASR)

Successful interdisciplinary working defines Dr. Bostock’s career as an applied social researcher. Unusually, Lisa has worked across housing, health and social care, within children’s and adult services, in different countries, Britain and Australia. Her research focuses on inter-professional approaches to health and social care, including reflective supervision to support building resilience in the helping professions and improve outcomes for people using services.

Since joining the University in 2015, she has specialised in developing “close to practice” evaluative methods based on direct observations of practice, leading a series of national evaluations to assess the impact of strengths-based practice approaches, including systemic social work and models based on motivational interviewing. Lisa has published extensively on reflective supervision, including editing a book on inter-professional supervision across health and social care which incorporates a chapter on compassionate supervision within the care home sector. 

Dr Louise Grant

Course Lead, Advanced Practice and Research: Social Work and Social Care, The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust

Louise Grant is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences at the University of Bedfordshire Having qualified as a social worker in 1987, the first 15 years of her career was working as a social worker and team manager in Children and Families Social Work.

Louise became a social work academic in 2008 and has concentrated upon building curricula in Higher Education which enable students to ensure they are prepared with evidence informed approaches for the realities of professional practice. Louise remains a registered social worker.

Her research focus is on improving the working conditions of social workers and others in the helping professions. She has written extensively with Professor Gail Kinman in the area of organisational and individual resilience of social workers and has worked on developing systems in practice which help professionals to thrive. Recent work focuses on developing and evaluating strategies to enhance the personal resources underpinning emotional resilience at an individual level, developing organisational resilience and designing a competency framework to help social work, social care and health leaders and  managers support resilience and wellbeing in their workforce.