About Frances

She completed her occupational therapy training at Brunel University London, where she received the Occupational Therapy Collegiality Award and the Vice-Chancellor’s Award before graduating with First Class Honours in 2015.

Since then, Frances has worked extensively in acute care at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, covering specialities including Trauma, Elective Orthopaedics, Health Care of Older People, Stroke, Wheelchair Services, Respiratory, Medicine, Oncology, Burns and Plastics, Cardiology, Surgery and Critical Care.

In 2018, she was involved in setting up a Staff Mental Health Shared Governance Council and was nominated for an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion award in recognition of her contribution. She has been twice nominated for an Occupational Therapy Phoenix Award in 2023/24 and completed the internationally recognised LEO (Leading an Empowered Organisation) programme in 2024. Frances currently works in Thoracic Surgery, in a role developed following the commencement of the Lung Cancer Screening programme in England. 

Frances is committed to supporting an unseen group in society – siblings of disabled people. In her work for Sibs (the only UK charity dedicated to supporting brothers and sisters of disabled children and adults), Frances has grown a network of peer support groups since 2017, training and supporting volunteers and connecting hundreds of people. She has written and co-ordinated an eBook Self-care for siblings (2020) and 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) . In 2024, Frances edited a collection of stories from sibs of autistic people Autism: The Sibling Perspective, and produced nine guides on topics such as mental capacity and managing care.

A sib herself, Frances draws on her lived experience growing up with a brother who has a severe learning disability alongside over a decade of experience volunteering and working in the sib community to work relentlessly towards a world where every sib is seen, valued and heard.