Andrew Cruickshank Chief Nurse

About me

Andrew is a GenerationQ Fellow and Chief Nurse at Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust.

Andrew is an experienced mental health nurse who has held several management positions within East London NHS Foundation Trust.

In his previous role as Associate Clinical Director he oversaw the delivery of safe, high-quality inpatient mental health care for the borough of Tower Hamlets. Since taking up the post, he successfully engaged senior clinicians to improve the delivery of patient-centred care. In his other role as Head of Nursing for Quality Improvement, Andrew focused on patient flow, recovery and reducing violence and restrictive practices.

He led on a project that aimed to reduce violence within inpatient units: ‘We have used a collaborative approach that has engaged large numbers of staff in this work and given them a forum to explore processes and whether their changes are improvements.’

Andrew is interested in how improvement work can be used to engage not only individual staff teams, but organisations. Through GenerationQ he hopes to learn more about how to work this way in other contexts, across organisational boundaries and in situations where there are inevitable tensions and competing priorities: ‘I hope to be able to learn how to use myself and colleagues to embed a culture of quality improvement and to learn how to extend this to our partner organisations.’

A specific interest for Andrew is around reducing conflict and violence within psychiatric inpatient care: ‘I like to engage clinical services, partner organisations, voluntary services and service user groups to find ways of reducing hostility and violence within our services.’