Dr Emma Wadey RN MH

Emma is a mental health nurse with over 25 years of experience across a wide range of health, emergency care and criminal justice settings. Emma speaks about her career journey, mental health & well-being within schools, to young people of all ages.

Emma started her nursing career in 1996 and has maintained clinical practice throughout her career. Emma continues to work as a consultant Nurse in a local Psychiatric liaison service within an Acute Hospital on the South East coast. Passionate about the provision and transformation of effective and recovery based mental health services she has led the development of new and innovative services for the most vulnerable in our society. More recently she has been the clinical lead for the National Mental health, learning Disability and Autism COVID-19 response cell, providing expert clinical oversight during the pandemic. During her career she has specialised in the prevention of suicide and promotion of health and wellbeing. This includes developing the StayAlive app and more recently has led work nationally to prevent suicide in healthcare staff.
Key to improving patient care is ensuring the mental health and wellbeing of Nurses, with this in mind she has developed and implemented the Professional Nurse Advocate program across England. There are now around 8000 trained professional Nurse advocates across England supporting their colleagues by delivering restorative clinical supervision.

Emma is committed to continual professional development and advanced practice and has developed clinical academic pathways for mental health nurses and contributed to the development of competency frameworks in advanced practice. A keen interest in research, Emma is the chair for NIHR funded research studies one focused on the health and wellbeing of nurses. Her PhD on the experience of grief after suicide developed the triple process model of coping with grief after suicide recognising the impact of stigma in mourning.