Head of mental health service in Doncaster says goodbye after 35 years with the NHS

Thirty-five years on, she retires this month as Doncaster’s Head of Mental Health and Learning Disability Services, responsible for a workforce of nearly 800 at Rotherham Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust (RDaSH).

Alison said: “It has been a fabulous career journey that I never expected to travel along. I’ve worked with brilliant staff, patients, carers and many other people and I have been well supported along the way.

“It has been a privilege to be involved in transforming mental health services. When I started in nursing, many people with a learning disability and mental health problems were in old-fashioned Victorian built asylum hospitals, now the offer of care and treatment is far more developed to enable most people to be cared for in the community.”

After qualifying as a registered mental health nurse she was one of the first junior staff community psychiatric nurses to join the then relatively new concept of a community mental health team - in Holderness, Hull - as the NHS started moving more services out of hospital.

As her career progressed into NHS management, Alison was given responsibility to launch the Early Intervention in Psychosis Service in Scunthorpe, which she looks back on as one of her proudest achievements.

Alison, who lives at Hessle, near Hull, later managed mental health services in Manchester and Rotherham, all the time keeping the family home in her native East Yorkshire. Her last 17 years have been spent with RDaSH and its predecessor organisation, taking up her current role based at Doncaster’s Tickhill Road Hospital in 2016.

Married to Dean, a railway manager based at Cleethorpes, the couple enjoy outdoor life and have two grown up children, Simon, aged 28, a professional tennis coach in Birmingham and Sophie, aged 25, a geography teacher in Derby.

Future plans include spending time at their holiday home in Normandy, planning to cycle the Lochs and Glens Way - 214 miles from Glasgow to Inverness - and “having time to do what I want,” laughed Alison.

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