I'm a clinical psychologist leading a service at Southmead Hospital in Bristol, a large NHS acute hospital where I have worked since 1986. I became a Fellow in 2003 and travelled to the USA to visit major centres that care for burn trauma and chronic pain. The experiences gained from the Fellowship and the contacts I made had a huge influence on my career. It gave me confidence to keep trying to improve NHS care.

I now work in an intensive care unit and was recently awarded sponsorship from the Churchill Fellowship Covid-19 Action Fund. For our team, Covid-19 has meant coping with immense pressures and emotional stress. We presently face challenges of exhaustion, trauma and burnout. The award has created opportunities to focus on staff recuperation. We have been trying different ways of listening and responding to nurses' experiences, linking in patients who have successfully recovered to relay their feedback to the team, helping the staff to connect more closely with the meaning and purpose of their efforts, to refresh as a group and move forwards. A number of these initiatives appear to be working well and we continue to learn.