Convergences: My introduction
How seventeen years in healthcare and a lifetime of considered taste finally converged
I have spent seventeen years in healthcare and government. I have spent forty-one years honing my taste, style and my identity through fashion. This is the story of how those two things were never actually separate.
Who I am is this: an identity deeply rooted in what I do, what I love and what I wear. Fashion, style and design. I can’t pinpoint a flashbulb moment where my passion, curiosity, and adoration started. But organically it grew, and I continued to pay greater attention to my identity, my taste and how what I wore made me feel.
My parents still tell the story of me in my stroller at 2yrs old, arm outstretched toward a Bert and Ernie sweatshirt, hand opening and closing. Have it. Want it. The want already fully formed, before I had the words to justify it. The taste keenly developed into a prototype. By ten, I was declining social invitations rather than be seen in the wrong clothes. Not vanity. Something more specific; a physical and emotional discomfort at the misalignment between what I wore and who I was. I didn’t have a framework for it then. I do now.
A self-confessed Anglophile, I moved from Canada to London at 21 in 2006. My first professional role here was exactly where my instincts pointed: a luxury, lifestyle and fashion PR agency. I adored it. After a year, my working visa ended that chapter. So Chris and I decided to marry in October 2008, allowing me to build the life I wanted for myself in the city that had become home.
What came next was not a plan. It was instinct and hard graft. In 2009, a friend mentioned a project role at the health charity, the British Lung Foundation. I applied, was hired, and found myself working in communications, lobbying and social marketing in healthcare.
I stayed for seventeen years.
I did not drift through those years. Every role I held from 2013 onward, I carved out for myself. I identified the gap, made the case, won the position. In one of the most complex, resource-constrained, politically charged institutions in the world, I was consistently the person who saw what wasn’t there yet and built it.
That is not a communications skill. It is systematic curiosity. It’s a drive to understand operating context and delivery models to define problems and make good strategic plays. It’s a drive to understand the policies and governance in the most complex healthcare system in the world to transform services with impact for people. It’s the institutional norms and culture which can be the biggest barriers or the greatest drivers of change. It’s collaboration across borders. It’s bringing clarity on goals, co-creating long-term visions and personal accountability. I strived for strategic and systemic impact every single day working in healthcare. I’m actually a pragmatist not an idealist, but I did hand on heart want to make a positive impact for people, and the health and prosperity of this nation. That is who I am and what I do.
I spent seventeen years in rooms with ministers, permanent secretaries, clinicians and national directors. People who will not be impressed by surface. Who require rigour. Who can smell an absence of substance immediately. I learned how to make a case, earn trust, and move things forward with people who give their attention carefully.
All of this time, the other part of my identity grew. The Vogue collection expanded. The eye sharpened. I thought carefully about what I wore and why — not as vanity but as intelligence. On the days when I knew the room would be difficult, I dressed for it. A Saint Laurent blazer, sharp shoulder blades. The physical sensation of wearing something that told me exactly who I was, even when the environment was trying to suggest otherwise. Body, emotion, context — all working together in a single garment on a single morning.
Here is what I have come to understand about the skills I built in healthcare and government, and why they transfer, not metaphorically but literally, to luxury, fashion and lifestyle.
In modern healthcare, the most progressive way of understanding a patient is called the biopsychosocial model (George Engel, 1977). It is a deceptively simple idea: that a person’s health cannot be understood through their body alone. It has to be understood through three dimensions working together — the biological (the body itself), the psychological (emotion, identity, mindset) and the social (context, environment, relationships, culture). Treat one in isolation and you miss the person. Treat all three and you actually help them.
Applied to fashion and the act of getting dressed, this changes everything. Clothes are not singular items. They are a system. They sit at the intersection of body, emotion and context. They are deeply connected to who you are, your taste, your physicality, how you need to feel that day, how you desire to be perceived and even how you want to perceive yourself.
Seventeen years of whole-system transformation taught me something else just as transferable: how to see the gap between what something is and what it could be. To understand what is causing it: structurally, culturally, operationally. How to design toward a different state with clarity, precision and collaboration. A luxury brand that has lost its identity. A retailer whose customer has quietly drifted. An individual who knows something is misaligned but cannot name it. These are the same problem. The methodology is the same methodology. The industry is different. The work is not.
After seventeen years in healthcare and government, I finally left at the end of March. It was so intrinsic to my identity, I am what I do, that it’s surreal even six weeks later to think I am not part of the institution and the engine room. But the time was right for me personally and professionally to apply everything I had learned over the past seventeen years into an industry which I’ve always felt connected to.
A Considered Curiosity is not a pivot. It is an arrival. The strategic methodology was built across seventeen years in some of the most demanding institutions in British public life. It serves to drive connections, outcomes and impact for people. It aims to transform experiences and our whole selves. The three things that have always defined me: what I do, what I love and what I wear have finally converged.
