Meet the Team

The Mind & Body Programme is centrally managed by a small team based in Counting House, Guy’s Hospital. Our team brings together a wealth of experience in healthcare, from both clinical and management roles:

Dr Sean Cross, Clinical Director

Sean is Clinical Director of the Mind & Body Programme at King's Health Partners; a Consultant Liaison Psychiatrist at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Managing Director of Maudsley Learning. Sean feels strongly that better integration of mental and physical healthcare provision requires evidence-based service transformation; high quality, meaningful education and training, and the harnessing of staff, patient and carer enthusiasm to bring about culture change in all our organisations.

Prof Matthew Hotopf CBE, Academic Director

Matthew is Vice Dean of Research at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, and Director of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust National Institute of Health Research Biomedical Research Centre. Matthew’s main area of research is in the grey area between medicine and psychiatry, exploring the interaction between mental and physical health, and uses ‘big data’ approaches to understand this interface better. He works clinically as a liaison psychiatrist at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and St Christopher’s Hospice.

Natalia Stepan, Senior Programme Manager (on sabbatical)

Natalia started her career in consulting and has since worked in the NHS primarily driving strategy development at a service, organisation and national level at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and NHS England/Improvement. She works across a number of Mind & Body projects and has an overview of the wider Programme.

Dr Naomi Stent, Primary Care Clinical Advisor

Naomi is a salaried GP in a busy Lambeth practice. She is passionate about General Practice and enjoys many aspects of this challenging and unpredictable specialty. She enjoys applying a holistic approach to her clinical practice and is particularly interested in improving the management of patients with medically unexplained symptoms. Her role is to improve social and primary care engagement with the Mind & Body programme.

Sophie Gray, Senior Project Manager

Sophie graduated with a BSc in Psychology and began working in the NHS in 2010. Having worked in health and social care commissioning and public health, Sophie now leads on a range of Mind & Body projects including Intellectual Disabilities, Staff Health and Wellbeing, and developing the Mind & Body offer for the Kings Health Partners Institutes. Sophie also has responsibilities for programme evaluation, data and analytics and research.

Raymond McGrath, Lead Nurse, IMPHS 

Ray is a registered mental health nurse. He trained at King’s College London and since qualifying has worked at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust in a variety of nursing roles. In his current role, Ray uses his clinical experience to support implementation of IMPHS initiatives in practice; he also has responsibilities for navigating the clinical systems - auditing and service evaluation. Ray is also undertaking an ICA Pre-doctoral Clinical and Practitioner Academic Fellow supported by Health Education England and the NIHR.

Gracie Tredget, Project Manager

Gracie is a Project Manager working on the Integrating our Mental and Physical Healthcare Systems (IMPHS) Project within the Mind and Body Programme at King’s Health Partners: this project focuses on researching and testing physical health interventions that can more effectively support adults living with serious mental illnesses and the team work closely with South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the Centre for Implementation Science at Kings College London to embed them into routine practice, read more here.

Gracie’s background in consulting has led her to work alongside various private and public sector organisations to develop, improve and deliver services that support adults living with mental health problems, their families, and reduce inequalities within local communities. In 2019, Gracie accepted the Mind Network Partnership and Profile Excellence Award for contributions to collaborative partnerships within the UK’s voluntary sector to improve early intervention and prevention-based approaches for adults living with common mental health problems.

Candice Ebelthite, Project Manager 

Candice graduated with an MA in English Literature, moved to the UK and somehow ended up working for the NHS. She started out as a PA/Office Manager at King's College Hospital, then moved into project support roles before joining the Mind and Body team as a project manager. 

Katie Cooke, Assistant Project Manager 

I graduated with an MSc in Public Health and joined the NHS in 2021. My previous role was as a Project Support Officer at University Hospital Southampton (UHS) working in the Digital Projects team. I joined the Mind and Body team in December 2022 and will be assisting on all things IMPARTS, including working with the team to publish our Self-Help resources, as well as looking at updating our website to reflect our new offer following the role out of EPIC.  

Misha Gardner, Assistant Project Manager

Misha graduated with a First Class Honours in BSc Psychology,  and has previously worked across the NHS, charitable and Higher Education Sectors including The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, Goldsmiths University of London and The Royal College of Psychiatrists. Misha joined the Mind & Body team  in December 2021 and leads on the Pain: Equality of Care and Support in the community (PEACS) programme,  which aims to support people from disadvantaged communities living with chronic pain across primary care. 

Carl Nwabudike, Assistant Project Manager

‘Carl graduated with a BSc in Psychology and started working in the NHS in 2018, having previously worked in the Strategy Team at South London & Maudsley. Carl currently helps to oversee the M&B improvement network, champions & champions newsletter.’

If you have any questions or suggestions, please email the team at mindandbody@slam.nhs.uk