Phoebe Rutherford

Phoebe is the Programme Support for Connecting Care for Children (CC4C), based at St Mary’s Hospital, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. The focus of Phoebe’s role is building connections with the local community and ensuring that the patient voice is at the heart of the team’s work.

Before joining CC4C, Phoebe worked for four years in the Trust’s Quality Improvement Team. Now working part-time with CC4C, Phoebe splits her time between the NHS and working as an artist, keeping an eye out for opportunities to bring creativity into her patient and public involvement work.

During the first COVID-19 lockdown she, alongside local citizens, and community groups, CC4C co-designed resources and webinars to address local children and young people’s health needs. These gave the local children and young people a voice during a time of relative exclusion within pandemic health and social planning.

Building on this work, the team hosted a children and young people’s health and wellbeing workshop in spring 2021. One of the key themes from the workshop was looking at how to empower young people to have ownership of their healthcare. Working as part of a trio, alongside Dr Arpana Soni and community leader, Hanan Ghouneim, Phoebe will look at how the Fellowship can be used to achieve tangible change in young people’s experiences of healthcare in Northwest London.