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Meet the team
Trustees

Sarah Giffen has been a Primary Healthcare Chaplain since 2013: seeing patients, developing the service and involved in research into primary healthcare chaplaincy. She has an MSc in Advanced Healthcare with a specialism in Chaplaincy. Sarah has developed the ACGP training programmes, alongside Helen Watts, and together they run the courses online. Sarah is principal chaplain for Primary Care Chaplaincy Scotland. She is the chair of the ACGP committee.

Angela Painter has been passionate about supporting the transformation of lives through whole person care since her teenage years when volunteering in India. Having trained at Great Ormond Street Hospitals and worked as a Registered Children's Nurse she went on to become a Health Visitor working holistically in South London and Kent. Her leadership experience was gained through a variety of senior roles within NHS primary care and as a Trustee of many organisations and charities. Angela spent 2 years exploring a calling to ordained ministry. She then moved into the charity sector as Chief Executive of a faith based Charity providing recovery and rehabilitation in the areas of addiction, homelessness and offending. Until May 2019 she was employed as Chief Executive at a Charity whose core mission was the integration of spiritual care with physical and emotional care and included both employed and volunteer Chaplains. In 2022 Angela was awarded a lifetime achievement award for making a difference to local communities and in 2023 she received the British Empire Medal in the Kings New Years Honours for services to the Voluntary Sector in Kent.

Helen Watts has worked as a Chaplain for Wellbeing in Primary Healthcare since 2016. As well as working with patients, she supports staff, supervises other chaplains and is involved in helping to develop chaplaincy services around the country. She has a B.Phil in Counselling and worked for many years as a counsellor in the public and private sectors, including Primary Healthcare, and in private practice. She is a trainer, specialising in stress management, pastoral care and wellbeing. She is one of the trainers for ACGP, co-designing and delivering both foundational training for primary healthcare chaplains, and CPD opportunities. Helen is a retired church pastor who travels widely around the world to help train others for pastoral and spiritual care ministry. 

Liz Bryson has a background in education and currently works in Paediatric Chaplaincy offering pastoral, spiritual and religious care to children, families and staff. Her journey in understanding the needs of the human spirit has been shaped by raising four children to adulthood; being a long-term carer for a disabled child; experiencing and processing loss through the death of an adult daughter; mentoring individuals and couples within a faith community. She tutors at Post Graduate level on spiritual care and staff support and leads the ACGP Accreditation process for Chaplains in General Practice.

Fiona Collins trained as an Engineer. She had experience being a Lay Pastor in a large church before working as a Chaplain for Wellbeing for nine years in two contexts of General Practice. The first was a Medical Centre based within a three centre group then also under the Mental Health and Wellbeing Hub for Sandwell and West Birmingham. She then became involved in Management of a team of Chaplains and also provided Supervision for Chaplains.
Non-trustee members of the trustee body

Ross Bryson has worked as a GP in a multicultural urban context for over 30 years. He has seen both the range of human need and the potential to meet that need through a compassionate and integrated primary healthcare team. He has been awarded a Fellowship of the Royal College of General Practice on account of his work in developing whole person healthcare. Understanding how the universal needs of the human spirit can be recognised and cared for in General Practice led Ross to establish an NHS GP Chaplaincy service in 1997. He has been involved in the research and development of this since then, which has included providing this service to the NHS within wellbeing hubs and defining professional standards for primary healthcare chaplaincy. He currently is a trustee and chairperson of Whole Person Health Trust.

Sally-Ann Robinson practised as a Solicitor in Medical Law until 2016. She was also a founding member and Trustee of Headway Lincolnshire. Since retirement, she has taken on a number of voluntary roles within the Lincolnshire Methodist District, including becoming Chair of the Lincolnshire Community Healthcare Chaplaincy (LCHC). Sally-Ann joined the ACGP committee after the LCHC contributed their experiences in Chaplaincy in GP surgeries across a large, rural county at the ACGP conference in January 2021.

Felicity Cox has been working in Primary Healthcare Chaplaincy in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, since returning to the UK in 2021 after a period living in France. She originally trained as a nurse, and then, concerned by how many children of primary school age were affected by parental relationship breakdown, she became a Couples Counsellor with RELATE in Basingstoke. She has been in church leadership for 20 years, working with women and young families in particular. Felicity has appreciated the opportunity to bring faith and spirituality into the General Practice setting as part of holistic patient care. The ACGP has supported her journey into Chaplaincy since her tentative initial enquiry, hence the desire to join the team and to encourage others to explore the role too.

Malcolm Laird has enjoyed working as a GP since 1987, mostly as a full-time GP partner but moving to part-time GP retainer status 3 years ago. His driving passion for improving whole-person medical consultations has led to the exploration of how spiritual health is fully integrated with, and foundational to, all the other modalities that make up personhood. He’s had a special interest in medical education for 3 decades and was a training programme director for many years, remaining a GP trainer and the surprised recipient of a fellowship for these efforts. Since January 2022, he has also worked as one of the chaplains in the L&G service for Ledbury Health Partnership, Herefordshire, having helped to set this up on behalf of ‘LEAF’ the local ecumenical Christian wellbeing charity.
Advisors
 
 

Gordon MacDonald is a GP in Glasgow where the chaplaincy service has been running for 12 years and has expanded into their local cluster of practices. He has carried out various research into primary healthcare chaplaincy and spoken at ACGP conferences in 2019 and 2021. Gordon is an advisor to the ACGP.



  2024 the Association of Chaplaincy in General Practice
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  2024 the Association of Chaplaincy in General Practice
  2024 ACGP
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  2024 ACGP