Mental health and palliative care: Equipped to care

Dr Jon Martin is a palliative care consultant who mostly works at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and is chair of the Association for Palliative Medicine neurology special interest forum.

His clinical interests include advance care planning in neurology and the application of philosophy, ethics and law to neuropalliative care, particularly as these relate to decision making in critical care.

He has a Master of Laws degree in healthcare ethics and law and was on the Ministry of Justice working party that wrote the re-drafted Code of Practice for the Mental Capacity Act. He recently co-wrote chapters on complex decision making and on palliative care for the third edition of the Queen Square Textbook of Neurology and is a member of the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust clinical ethics committee.

Dr Chloe Beale is consultant liaison psychiatrist and clinical lead for liaison psychiatry at Homerton Hospital, as well as Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She was previously suicide prevention lead for East London NHS Foundation Trust.

She has a master's degree in medical law and a particular interest in mental capacity and mental health law in acute settings and law and ethics surrounding suicide. She has published papers and speaks widely on these subjects at regional and national academic events.

She is an elected member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists liaison faculty executive committee and is involved in policy work related to her field of expertise. She was invited to give evidence in Parliament on proposed changes to the Mental Health Act and has presented to the government advisory group on suicide prevention.

Professor Jonathan Koffman, professor of palliative care and associate director of the Wolfson Palliative Care Research Centre, is a health services researcher who conducts research focusing on the interface between inequity and palliative and end-of-life care, clinical uncertainty and decision making and the development and evaluation of complex palliative care interventions.

He has a particular interest in researching the interface between ethnicity, culture and palliative care and also clinical uncertainty and how it manifests itself in end-of-life care.

Dr Rachel Gibbons has worked in the NHS over the past 20 years in various psychiatric settings as a consultant psychiatrist and consultant medical psychotherapist. She has recently been working as the National Director of Therapies for the Priory Group.

She is a psychoanalyst and group analyst and current Co-Chair of the Patient Safety Group, Chair of the Working Group on the Effect of Suicide and Homicide on Psychiatrists and Vice-Chair of the Psychotherapy Faculty, at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Carol is Professor of Health and Social Care at University College London. Her work explores the interactions of the various stakeholders in organisational encounters, primarily health and social care systems, with a focus on marginalised groups and intersectionalities. Within this, she draws on sensitivities developed from her own lived experience. Carol is a mixed methodologist, leading or co-leading work on, and with expertise, in approaches ranging from machine learning and big data analysis to multi-modal ethnography. As such, she specialises in innovative transdisciplinary, participatory and arts-based methods, knowledge exchange and transformative outputs.  Her focus is always on the practical application of her research to improve services.

She sits on or works with various national and international funding and research priority setting panels and has won awards for her innovative practice-focused work.  Her outputs using participatory methods, inclusivity and intersectionality and critical realism provide examples of work that has influenced policy and practice nationally and internationally. This includes new interventions that have been rolled out in the UK, others that have been adopted outside the UK, and approaches that have been cited as best practice examples and templates for organisations such as the National Institute for Health and Care Research and Cochrane. Carol has written various book chapters on applied methodology, is currently leading on the development of the publisher SAGE’s methods modules on inclusive research and underserved groups for their online training platform and is co-editor of the successful textbook ‘ Researching Society and Culture’. Her toolkit on involving people with disabilities or from minoritised ethnic groups has been adopted by the National Institute for Health and Care Research for their new research calls. She has contributed to a recent UK government POSTnote on disabilities, employment and education.