Fiona Meecham’s current role is Lecturer in Healthcare Leadership and Management at the Alliance Manchester Business School, where she delivers an MSc in Healthcare Leadership for people working in a wide range of senior clinical and non-clinical roles across the NHS. Previous roles include:
Director of Customers and Communities at Rossendale Borough Council, where Fiona looked after a range of services from IT to Enforcement, Graveyards and Bin Collection (glamourous!) and led on health and community safety partnerships.
• Assistant Director of Corporate Development and Performance Branch at GMP, where Fiona looked after a range of functions including Scanning, Planning, Inspection and Review and led on the Force wide Citizen Focus programme.
• Improvement Manager at Salford Primary Care Trust, where Fiona looked after the staff and public engagement functions and led on the development of a programme of work to manage long-term conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.
• Principal Community Safety Officer at Salford City Council where Fiona took the lead on the strategic development and operational roll-out and management of the Community Wardens Service across the City.
Amongst other roles, and a bit of consultancy/coaching work, she has also worked for a Criminal Defence Solicitors’ Office in Scotland, taking witness statements, and that was when Fiona decided she no longer wanted to work for ‘The Dark Side’ and would rather be a Jedi! However, Fiona was never brave enough to be a Police Officer (her words), so she went off to study Criminology instead. Academic credentials include:
• BA (Hons) Criminology from Nottingham Trent University, where she was supervised by Prof Nick Tilly.
• MPhil Criminology from The Institute of Criminology at The University of Cambridge, where she focused on crime prevention and policing.
MSc Human Resource Management from Manchester Metropolitan University, which Fiona self-funded and studied for in her own time whilst in the Director role at Rossendale. That’s where Fiona started researching resilience at work.
Fiona is currently researching for a part-time PhD in Business and Management at the University of Manchester and her research focus is the role of compassion in the workplace in improving wellbeing and productivity. Fiona is lucky enough to be supervised by Prof Sir Cary Cooper.
And to complete a trio of lucky encounters, Fiona was ‘sent’ for some coaching when she worked in Salford and was amazed to be allocated Pauline Clare as her coach.
Fiona has recently written a ‘Compassion at Work Toolkit’ for the National Forum for Health and Wellbeing at Work (which is available on OscarKilo). She also designed the ‘Transformation Framework’ model which is being used by the College of Policing as the basis for their peer-review programme, to generate organisational improvement, and Fiona has delivered some training for them on this.
She is a Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute, a Member of the Institute of Directors, and an Associate of the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development.
