About Frances

Frances graduated with First Class Honours in Occupational Therapy from Brunel University London in 2015, receiving both the Occupational Therapy Collegiality Award and the Vice-Chancellor’s Award.

She has since built extensive acute care experience at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, working across specialties including Trauma, Orthopaedics, Older People’s Care, Stroke, Respiratory, Oncology, Burns and Plastics, and now Cardiology, Surgery and Critical Care.

She helped establish a Staff Mental Health Shared Governance Council in 2018 and has been nominated for an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion award and three Occupational Therapy Phoenix Awards. She completed the internationally recognised LEO leadership programme in 2024.

Alongside her NHS work, Frances has been deeply involved with Sibs, the only UK charity dedicated to supporting brothers and sisters of disabled children and adults.  Since 2017, she has developed a national network of peer support groups, trained volunteers, and connected hundreds of adult siblings. She has written and edited a range of resources, including the eBook Self-care for siblings (2020), Autism: The Sibling Perspective (2024) and nine guides on topics such as mental capacity and managing care. She is a co-author of Subjective poverty moderates the association between carer status and psychological outcomes of adult siblings of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (2022).

She began writing for LeftLion in 2024 and became community editor the following year.

As a sib herself, Frances draws on her lived experience and long-standing involvement in the sib community to champion a world where every sibling is seen, valued and heard.