How I got here.
I trained in the Highlands and qualified in 2009, having worked as a support worker all the way through my degree. My early years were the kind of nursing that teaches you fast: agency shifts across hospitals and care homes, and long stretches looking after people at home on ventilators and with tracheostomies, where you learn that families know more than the textbook and that a calm voice at 3am is a clinical skill.
From there I moved into complex care and management across Scotland, and in 2016 I came home to run community hospitals in Badenoch and Strathspey for the NHS. Two hospitals, a minor injuries unit, a budget, a redesign, and a lot of very good people. I was the lead clinical stakeholder on the design of a new hospital, which remains one of the pieces of work I'm proudest of.
In 2021 I took a leap into medical cannabis. It was legal, it was barely three years old as a prescribed medicine in the UK, and nursing's place in it was still being worked out. I became Nurse Manager of a large national cannabis clinic, and wrote the governance framework, the prescribing policies and the audit programme that helped it achieve a Good rating from the CQC. I set up a team of nurses and prescribing pharmacists, and a nurse-led clinic that gave patients someone with time to listen.
After that I went back to the bedside, or the screen, seeing up to twenty-five patients a day across pain, mental health and complex conditions, and working with producers on product development. Thousands of consultations later, I have a fair idea of what patients ask, what worries them, what goes wrong and what helps. The Green Thistle is where I put that to work for other people: clinics, clinicians, and the patients and carers who just want someone to explain it properly.