With over 20 years of experience in the Third Sector, Gwen has worn many hats—Support Fund Manager at the Scottish Drugs Forum, Manager at Rape and Sexual Abuse Service Highland, Engagement Manager with Diabetes UK, and a commissioning role with HTSI.
The common thread? A passion for people, partnerships, and making systems work better for those who need them most.
Gwen holds a BA in the Integration of Health and Social Care and a Postgraduate Certificate in Understanding a Resilience Landscape.
Gwen’s all about connection, collaboration, and tackling complex challenges. If there’s a conversation to be had about care, she’s probably already having it—and making sure everyone’s invited. Her work has focused on information sharing, access to training and support for staff, escalating issues with admission to or discharge from hospital and sector accommodation challenges
What are you currently working on
Within Highland there are 45 Care Homes covering a mix of urban and rural settings.
Objectives:
• Ensuring homes have the opportunity to engage, raise issues, and have their views represented in strategic forums
• Building mechanisms to share information, best practice, and emerging themes across care homes, collaborating with the sector to develop
future plans.
• Strengthening collaboration and contingency planning, linking with key networks including Scottish Care, HSCP representatives, nursing and
healthcare colleagues, and relevant planning groups.
• Supporting the development and delivery of recruitment and retention plans, including training, staff wellbeing, and wider factors such as
access to housing.
• Assisting in developing, implementing, and evaluating the work of the CCHST. Ensuring that it demonstrates measurable impact on care
home residents. Promoting more collaborative and sustainable service models, ensuring independent sector views are considered
throughout.
Examples:
• After Identifying issues with hospital admissions, discharges and stays I developed data‑collection methods; produced a strategic report
which then informed a service review and am now part of group improving process, pathway and feedback loop.
• Worked collaboratively to identify and resolve access issues and develop and share an easy access training resource with sector. Reviewed
and updated quarterly.
• Meaningful Activity Network – Meeting once a month it includes Care Homes from independent sector and in-house from Argyll and Bute
and North Highland. The most successful action from this network has been the Care Home Olympics event in 2024 and the Care Home
Highland Games in 2025.
• Independent Sector Care Home Bulletin – sent out every Friday this is a summary of highlighted activity in the previous week and upcoming
items. Recognising the volume of information that is shared to the sector it summarises key items for training, feedback requests,
information, events, and legislative information as well as input from relevant strategic and development meetings into one accessible
format.
Future Plans ,Areas of Work and Upcoming Events
• Rollout and implementation of the new hospital admission / discharge and feedback pathway and process
• Continue to grow and develop manager and senior staff support
• Staff wellbeing event
• A Care Home cookbook project – in collaboration with Argyll and Bute Independent Sector and in-house Care homes, developing a
cookbook which shares the tactile and sensory experiences for residents in shopping, growing, cooking, baking
• A who to call for additional support resource pack
