Rebecca is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Lead in the service. She also works in North Buckinghamshire Psychological Therapies. She has trained and worked in autism diagnosis, and in adapting psychological therapy for autistic people, over many years in the NHS.

Rebecca first became interested in the experiences of autistic people during her psychology degree. This interest grew after reading Donna Williams’ books Nobody Nowhere and Somebody Somewhere.

On completing her clinical training, she spent a few years working in children’s mental health and paediatric services. This gave a good grounding in a variety of developmental and neurodevelopmental conditions and the challenges people face navigating systems that don’t always fit or work well.

Since 2001, she has worked in adult services and has been involved in local and national networks to support improvements in services for autistic people.

Laura completed her professional doctorate in counselling psychology at City, University of London in 2019.

She first became interested in autistic people’s experiences in her personal life. This interest grew professionally through her therapeutic work with autistic people in an adult community eating disorder service, as well as through autism training courses.

Laura is passionate about raising awareness of autism and autism equality (ensuring that autistic individuals have the same rights, opportunities, and access to resources as their non-autistic peers).

Sarah trained at the University of Reading and, since qualifying in 2014, has worked in the clinical areas of adult learning disability, mental health and autism assessment with both young people and adults.

Sarah is passionate about neuroaffirming practice and improving the experiences of autistic people in diagnostic services and has led on projects to adapt diagnostic reports.

She has specific clinical interest in the experiences of trans, gender questioning and gender diverse autistic people and is part of a committee of speech and language therapists who have formed a clinical excellence network to further work in this area.

In her spare time, Sarah has recently taken up running and also enjoys strength training, board games and knitting.

Michaela is our Mental Health Liaison Nurse for Autism. They attended the university of Bedfordshire and completed their undergraduate degree in 2017.

After qualifying, Michaela worked on a male acute psychiatric unit. During their time there they gained both clinical and operational experience. They developed an interest in co-production and how best to ensure that patients’ voices are heard. Michaela has always been passionate about improving the experiences of autistic patients accessing mental health services.

Michaela is driven to help colleagues make the necessary adaptation, to ensure that autistic patients have equal access to the services available.  This led to them joining BARA in November 2022.

Linda is our service administrator. She has only recently taken on this role and has really got involved with the procedures involved at the beginning stage to include the autism referral process right through to sending out the autism assessments.

She is also responsible for answering your phone call and email enquiries. Prior to the role, Linda worked for 2 years as an administrator with the Adult Mental health Team.