Helping people living with chronic pain, and their carers, to survive navigating the NHS.
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Navigating UK healthcare when you’re already at your limit is brutal. Join our community for the unfiltered truth about the healthcare experience…along with reflections to help you find calm in the chaos.
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Welcome
We work with healthcare leaders and teams to make healthcare easier for patients, carers, and visitors.
Our mission is simple: remove unnecessary stress and confusion. Clear the hurdles. Help people reach appointments smoothly, safely, and on time.
For 35 years, I worked in and alongside the NHS in senior clinical, operational, leadership, and independent coaching and consultancy roles. I helped design and deliver services. I sat in board meetings where decisions were made. I coached the people carrying the weight of those decisions. And I trained leaders and clinicians to coach others so that coaching became part of everyday conversations. My contributions have been recognised in the clinical leadership press.
I understand how hospitals actually work.
I understand how compromises get made.
And I understand the pressure leaders and clinicians carry every day.
I’m not naive about the NHS. I know its brilliance. I also know its constraints. What I didn’t understand, not fully, was what it feels like to use the system when you’re already at your limit.
That understanding arrived on July 22nd, 2023.
My lovely partner, Mark, woke up with excruciating, debilitating, backpain. Unfortunately the MRI doesn’t explain his symptoms so we’re rather stuck. A huge part of my life now revolves around the fact that I’ve become a part-time carer, one of the growing army worldwide.
From that moment on, I began to see healthcare from another side.
The car parks.
The drop off points.
The signage.
The waiting lists.
The user-unfriendly policies and design. All of this feeds into my writing.
Living with chronic pain changes how you experience everything. It strips away tolerance for friction. It narrows attention to what is missing, unclear, inaccessible, and unnecessarily hard long before you reach a clinician.
By the time care begins, people are already exhausted.
And once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
I now work at the intersection of these two perspectives. Insider and outsider. Professional and carer. Someone who understands why systems are the way they are, and someone who sees exactly how those same systems land on bodies already in pain.
Not to blame.
But to make the invisible visible.
To ask better questions about access. To help healthcare organisations see where anxiety is generated long before treatment begins. And to explore how access to care might be designed for people who are already at their limit.
Alongside all of this, I’ve reached the highest level of a precision sport, leading without force, training without dominance, and communicating clearly with a team mate who doesn’t speak Human. Working with dogs has taught me more about clarity, trust, and resilience, than any text-book ever could.
Clarity is not a skill.
It’s how trust is built.
And how anxiety is reduced. And for people living with chronic pain, it can be the difference between coping and collapse.
That’s why I work with healthcare organisations.
Because once you’ve seen it, you have a responsibility to respond.
THE DIARY OF A CARER IS AN UNFILTERED JOURNEY INTO THE BRUTAL REALITY OF NAVIGATING UK HEALTHCARE SERVICES ALONG WITH REFLECTIONS AND STORIES TO HELP YOU FIND CALM IN THE CHAOS.
Angela has embarked upon a curiosity driven journey to discover untold truths, unlearned lessons, and important insights that she hopes will make her own, her partners’, and her readers’ experience of navigating healthcare easier.
If this is happening in your organisation, it isn’t deliberate and can be fixed. Not by adding more rules or blaming the staff, but through seeing things through the eyes of your patients and their carers.
We’ll do the legwork most teams don’t have the time to do. Walking routes. Reading letters as a first timer. Paying attention to where people get lost, give up, or feel foolish asking for help.
This starts with a conversation. No pitch. No rant. No blame. Just a clear look at what’s getting in the way, and whether it’s something we should work on together.
Angela Watson 