Ailsa is Head of Perinatal, Children and Young People’s Mental Health at NHS England and Improvement.  She has over 25 years’ experience of policy, service design and implementation, mainly in relation to children and young people.  She has worked as a civil servant in DHSC and DfE and also in the NHS, at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust where roles included Divisional Director of Gender Services and, for seven years, Director of the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) National Unit.  In that role she led the scale up of FNP – a targeted, evidence based, public health home visiting programme – across much of England and then a significant programme of innovation and change.

Ailsa is interested in reducing inequalities, prevention, listening to the voices of those who use and deliver services and in translating good evidence into deliverable, high quality services on the ground.  She is a Health Foundation Generation Q fellow with a Masters in Healthcare Leadership and Quality Improvement, and a member of the Sciana European health leaders’ network.