Sally qualified as a social worker but her career changed direction after a major bereavement. She became a researcher in primary health care and then in social services. Since her PhD, an ethnographic study of the community care needs assessment of older people, she has been intrigued by negotiations between older people and practitioners. Her research and publications have focused on work with older people in social and health care settings and on promoting and enhancing gerontological social work practice. She was a Senior Lecturer in Social Work and is currently a Research Visiting Fellow at Oxford Brookes University.

She has a particular interest in spirituality in later life, in old age as a time of transition and growth and in understanding ourselves and others through story and language.”

Kate is an HCPC registered music therapist with 18 years’ clinical experience. In 2016 she completed an MSc in palliative care from King’s College London funded by the Samuel Sebba Scholarship. Kate is also a qualified yoga and mindfulness teacher (CPCAB) and works with people with chronic and life-limiting conditions and their families into bereavement. She delivers training workshops in Breath-Body-Mind integration (BBMi) at www.sobelleducation.org.uk and is a guest lecturer on the MSc in Palliative Care at KCL and on the PG cert in Psycho-spiritual care at Oxford Brookes. After 5 years on the Wellcome funded www.lifeofbreath.org project at University of Bristol, Kate is now doing her PhD at the Wolfson Centre for Palliative Care Research at the Hull York Medical School funded by UKRI (i3).

Kate is a registered nurse with a passion for community-based nursing and palliative care. Currently she works within Sobell House Hospice in Oxford as Education Lead for OxCERPC (Oxford Centre for Education & Research in Palliative Care), an independent charity which designs and delivers education to health and social care staff locally, nationally and internationally around holistic end of life care. Kate is also a specialist nurse. The holistic nature of palliative and end of life care enables the natural integration of spiritual care into everyday work, and it is this that Kate hopes to develop further in her education role.

Kate is also a volunteer chaplain within Oxfordshire’s community, and currently teaches on the PGCert in Psycho-spiritual Care.

Chaplaincy volunteer, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, with lived experience. Retired Church of England priest. Early career NHS Chief Speech and Language Therapist.

Rhonda Riachi is a Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and has worked in professional health education since 2008. Her MSc dissertation explored person-centred communication in dementia care. From 2019 to 2021 she managed the Oxford Centre for Spirituality and Wellbeing before it moved to Oxford Health NHS Trust. Rhonda edits De Numine, the journal of the Alister Hardy Trust, which studies spiritual experience.

Joanna Tulloch is a poet, artist, icon-painter, Methodist local preacher, and long-term mental health patient. She painted the icon of the Angel with Golden Hair that hangs in the Warneford hospital chapel in Oxford, and is the author of A Reflection of God, a poetry collection on Christian themes, and The Invitation to the Garden, a mystical work telling the story of her experience of grace whilst in the midst of a mental health crisis. She is a retired lexicographer with the Oxford English Dictionary and lives in Oxford with her husband George.