About
Sam is a Principal Teaching Fellow and the Director of Programmes for Nursing and Midwifery. His research focuses around the quality and safety of mental health care, incorporating quantitative methodologies to understand and model safer staffing. He is a registered mental health nurse, registered teacher (General Teaching Council) with QTS, holds an MSc with distinction and is a current PhD student under the supervision of Professor Peter Griffiths, Professor Jane Ball and Dr Chiara Dall'ora.
Sam's education combines psychological formulation, risk assessment, research methods, lived experience and high-fidelity simulation to provide rounded, in-depth and contemporaneous education to pre-registration health care professionals.
Sam is an invited member of multiple national steering groups for Mental Health Nursing, working alongside NHS England, Health Education England, the Queen's Nursing Institute and colleagues across a number of sectors.
Alongside this, he has over 10 years experience in a variety of operational and strategic clinical roles, specialising in acute psychiatry, crisis intervention/suicide prevention and management, alongside therapeutic approaches to care.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Patient and Staff Safety
- Organisational Systems
- Epidemiological/ecological approaches to patient safety
- Quality Improvement Methodology
- Minimum/Safe Staffing Levels
Current research
Sam has experience with systematic reviews, integrative reviews, meta-narrative synthesis and quantitative methods.
He is currently completing a PhD using epidemiological approaches to investigate staffing configurations, patient safety and care quality in mental health settings.
Sam's research is largely quantitative in nature. Specifically: statistics and regression modelling using R. Sam has particular interest in using the R programme to model and plot diagrams to understand and interpret data.
Sam also has interests in machine-learning and artificial intelligence, focusing on algorithmic functions within large language models and their application to health care and education.
Publications
Teaching
Sam currently teaches in a number of areas, including:
- Workforce and Organisational Systems
- Suicide prevention & self-harm management
- Quality Improvement
- Psychological Formulation
- Risk Assessment & Management
- Safety of Care
- Systematic Reviews (Undergraduate and MSc/MN Supervision)
- High Fidelity Acute Mental Health Simulation
External roles and responsibilities
Biography
Sam completed undergraduate studies in English Literature in Bath in 2005 before working with people with autism, challenging behaviour and mental ill health. In 2008, he trained to be a teacher in mainstream education, gaining a PGCE in Secondary Education (English) from the University of Southampton.
In schools, Sam went on to teach English, Music, Photography, Film and Media to Secondary and Further Education levels, gaining Qualified Teacher Status (QTS). He had particular engagement and interest in working with children with additional learning needs, developmental issues, mental ill health and safeguarding. Sam went on to work with young people in a Forensic Medium-Secure Mental Health Unit before completing studies for a PGDip in Mental Health Nursing in 2012.
Post-Registration, Sam worked in acute settings with adults with mental ill health, covering acute psychiatric admissions and intensive care, Accident and Emergency and Community Crisis Care. During this time, he joined the University of Southampton School of Medicine, teaching Psychiatry on the undergraduate and post-graduate medicine programmes, and clinical skills modules to junior doctors. He gained a distinction at Master's Level in 2017, publishing a systematic review of quality improvement (Lean methodology) in the NHS.
In 2019, Sam joined the School of Health Sciences as a Senior Teaching Fellow before being appointed as Principal Teaching Fellow and the manager for Mental Health Education in 2021. In March 2023, he became the Director of Programmes for Nursing and Midwifery.
He is a peer-reviewer for the Journal of Advanced Nursing, Human Resources for Health, BMC Nursing, Sage Open Nursing, and Human-Computer Interaction Journals an invited member of national steering groups around mental health nursing and has contributed towards guidance documents and education standards for Mental Health Nursing across the UK.
Prizes
- Dean's Award for Citizenship (2023)
- RCN Strategic Scholarship Alliance Award (2022)