Sheila is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Health and Education at Middlesex University where she has been since the 1990s. She entered academia after practising as a nurse specialising in cancer care. She was always determined to teach nurses, having been motivated by supporting students in clinical areas and her own experiences navigating education and a particularly influential nurse tutor.
Sheila has taught physiology, pathophysiology and pharmacology for many years extending her reach across a number of disciplinary areas. Her key focus is application to practice drawing on a wide range of effective pedagogical approaches to achieve this. This has resulted in a broadening and extending of teaching, reaching out to clinical communities and practitioners as well as nursing and healthcare colleagues across Europe and beyond. She has supported and developed European exchanges within her university as programme leader for BSc European Nursing and Exchange coordinator making an impact on widening student experiences and horizons.
Supporting incoming and outgoing exchange students motivated her to galvanise her exchange partners to successfully bid for the HEALINT project which developed quality assurance processes for clinical learning environments internationally. The success of this project has led to a second, extending the context across other healthcare professional fields.
She is driven to make a difference to students and her career ‘golden threads’ revolve around commitment to diversity and inclusivity and European opportunities. Her explorations of inclusivity within learning and teaching developed further in her doctoral research and she has since presented and published on these topics for wider dissemination and shared learning in a range of peer-reviewed journals and conferences. She has also authored and co-edited a series of clinical skills texts and edited a book on dimensions of learning and teaching in nursing drawing on her areas of interest and research projects.
Sheila holds a range of other roles, including Director of Learning Teaching and Quality in the School of Health and Education, Chair of the University Teaching Fellows, being a link lecturer for practice, personal tutor, and member of Federation of International Nurse Educators (FINE UK).