Sarah McAllister
Sarah McAllister is an Improvement Advisor in the Quality Improvement department, supporting our Forensics directorate.
Sarah is a mental health nurse by background having predominantly worked in acute mental health inpatient settings. Sarah is a strong advocate for service user involvement within research and QI work. Recently she worked alongside a group of service users, carers and clinicians to co-design an intervention toolkit to improve nurse-patient interactions on acute mental health wards. She has also co-designed and delivered an extensive range of teaching and training sessions related to this and other work.
Sarah holds a PhD in Health Services Research, with further skills and expertise in behaviour change, qualitative research methods and grant writing. She also has an extensive publication record and can support teams or individuals who may like to write up and present their QI projects at conferences or in peer reviewed publications.
When not at work, Sarah loves all things music and dance, cooking, travelling, and socialising with friends.
An Improvement Advisor role involves:
- Extra support for those projects working
on one of the Trust priority workstreams - Expertise in improvement methods and tools
Their responsibilities are:
- Attending and help coordinate the monthly directorate QI forums
- Teaching staff and service users & carers in improvement methods and tools
- Strategic support for directorate in defining improvement priorities, aligning QI work, building capability
- Regular supervision sessions in each directorate with QI coaches
- Alert clinical/service director and sponsors of projects that are not progressing or where support structure is weak
