Karen Taylor

Lead for Arts and Patient Public Engagement, Heart and Lung Critical Care Clinical Group, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust

I joined Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals in January 2014 as their interim Head of Arts.  I loved it so much I stayed!

I’ve worked for much of my professional life in the arts and health sector, with a special interest in assets based community development and participatory arts, usually in programme management, fundraising and evaluation roles.  I spent 11 years at the Arts Council, culminating in leading Be Creative Be Well, the arts strand of a multi-disciplinary programme to improve health and wellbeing in the community.

My current job is focused on leading the hospitals’ strategies for arts and patient and public engagement. This work is part of “patient services”, where teams work together to provide patients with effective non-clinical support to improve experiences of care and promote wellbeing.  

I’ve worked in a patient experience role for 4 years and am committed to involving patients as equal partners in driving patient-initiated improvements in healthcare. Two years ago, I joined the Leadership of the Heads of Patient Experience Network. This is a useful network for patient experience and improvement leads across the NHS, facilitated by NHS England.  It has played a key role in my professional development which is really important for roles where there are no professional membership bodies or accreditation.

The NIHR ARC NWL Improvement Leader Fellowship (I’m part of a trio with Lindsey Stedman and Jude Irvine) is a great opportunity for learning and researching improvement in healthcare.  In this project, our trio will explore, pilot and research new approaches to patient and public engagement (PPE). In particular, we want to increase and diversify the membership of our patient group and find new approaches to increase involvement from patients, carers and the public in quality improvement and systems change initiatives.