Liz studied her PhD at the University of Manchester funded through a highly competitive and prestigious NIHR Clinical Doctoral Research Fellowship. Her thesis reported 'how patients are risk assessed for discharge from acute hospital care'. Liz published several outputs from her thesis namely; a Scoping Review of global discharge policies and this later informed Department of Health principles for discharging patients. She also published the 'role of a discharge coordinator in acute care' and 'the patient and carer perspectives of the discharge lounge'.

She continued to study through a Health Education England Post Doctoral Award, at Birmingham University, Supervised by Professor Annie Topping.  She studied Criteria Led Discharge and embarked on producing the first global systematic review of the literature on this topic (2018). As always Liz is keen to emphasise the translation of her work in practice and she worked in acute medicine in a large NHS Trust, where she worked closely with clinicians to apply this work.  A process to describe how to implement criteria led discharge in practice soon resulted.  This was published in 2019.  Following this she was invited to collaborate with the Emergency Care Implementation Support Team at NHS England (formerly NHS Improvement).  Her close working ensured a larger platform to translate her findings across the UK.  At the end of her post doctoral work she wrote the national guidance to implement criteria led discharge and a standard operating protocol - used by many trusts to guide the implementation of their CLD work.

Liz was awarded a place on the NIHR 70@70 Nurse and Midwife Research Leaders Programme (2019-2022), where she focused on capability and capacity development of registered nurses to undertake research. This work has resulted in many formative constructs she uses presently - such as Critically Appraised Topic Groups and Publishing Master Classes.

In October 2021 Liz joined University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust in the Centre for Care Excellence in a joint clinical academic role.  She describes this as her best job ever, combining her 32 years of registered nursing expertise with her academic endevours.

She continues to develop her criteria led discharge work and has expanded this with NHS MIdlands, across 22 hospitals during 2022/3, both developing and testing the feasibility of using a point prevalence tool to identify the opportunities for patients to be discharged using this method. This will be published shortly (2024).

Liz was awarded a Life Fellowship of the Society for Acute Medicine in 2016 for her 'outstanding contribution to multidisciplinary staff development.' She continues to be an active member of the nurses group within the membership and presents regularly at their National and International Conferences.

Research Interests:

Patient Discharge

Risk Assessment for Patient Discharge

Criteria Led Discharge

Professional Nurse Advocates

Workplace Violence

Delirium

I have developed three PhD Studentships with Coventry University CHC, to align with my research programmes, namely:

1. Criteria Led Discharge from Hospital. Funded by NHS England (ECIST); Coventry University Stipend, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust (R&D Department).  Sep 2023.
2. Criteria Led Discharge for Post Partum Patients in Lower and Middle Income Countries.  Funded by Coventry University stipend.
3. Patient and Relative Perpetrated Violence against Staff: Post Intervention Strategies. Funded by Clive Richards Foundation. May 2023.
4. Patient Risk Assessment for Discharge from Hospital. Lecturer at Coventry University.  Starts January 2024.
5. Professional Nurse Advocate Programme: Quality Improvement Work. Funded by NHS England and Stipend. Commences May 2024.
6. I jointly supervise a PhD student from Birmingham University (with Professor Annie Topping) who is Studying 'Sepsis in Lower Middle Income Countries'.  She is due to submit for Viva in March 2024.