My adult life has been a fusion of my professional career in child health with endurance sport and adventures. Many people express great surprise that I was able to continue my professional career while pursuing extreme adventures. To me, sport and adventures propelled my career further than I ever thought could be possible.

Time out on the rugby field, in a rowing boat or running a marathon helped to rejuvenate my passion for child health. Rather than just a selfish endeavour, looking after my own well-being gave me the energy to do my ‘day job’ with passion.

Enduring the hardship of endurance sport (namely 77 days rowing across the Atlantic Ocean and 78 days rowing across the Indian Ocean) also equipped me well for the hardship of building my own digital health company. People love the idea of a start-up but not the reality of what building a company actually entails. Compared to rowing across two oceans even, starting a company is unrelenting and brutal.

Aparito focuses on enabling global decentralised/ hybrid clinical trials in rare diseases and paediatrics. More recently, in light of the COVID-19 outbreak we have also moved towards providing remote patient care for cancer patients as part of virtual care hubs. Moving our flagship Atom5™ platform from concept to a working model that supports remote patient monitoring in all four continents of the world took mammoth efforts. I’ve encountered many barriers in my journey to build Aparito. One of the main one being that people like to “box” you, to define you, and it’s hard to move out of their perceived box of who you should be and what you should do. To be a fusion of insight, passions, interests, skills, knowledge, views and experience is not always an easy one to explain.

I had found that in sport too. I was too small/ feminine to play rugby prop forward. Too short to be rower and too big to be a runner, but still I persevered. In business, I’m boxed as just a children’s nurse. I am immensely proud of my paediatric nursing career and I would never change that start to my professional career. But I have now been out of nursing for longer than I was in nursing, including four years completing my PhD at University College London, six years as a regulator at the European Medicine Agency and now six years at Aparito, so my nursing career is a big part of me, but certainly not all of me.

As a woman and a children’s nurse, many confined me to a box that don’t match the ambitions I have for Aparito. From investors and business partners, to clients and employees – I have met this issue over and over again. Including completely unsolicited advice. Lots of people (mostly men) tell me to tone down my opinion, that I’m too strong. I’ve had people counter-argue my opinion only to have them repeat the same opinion back to me a few weeks later. I’ve also been told that as I’m “just a nurse” I wouldn’t be able to run my own company.

Ironically being a nurse and being strong is exactly what has made it possible for me to build Aparito so far. I believe nurses and the training and skills nurses all over the world have, make us extremely well placed to build businesses, particularly in the digital health space. Being able to make informed decisions quickly while under pressure, being able to work closely and effectively with others, understanding problems from many different perspectives and, possibly most importantly, having care and compassion for the patients that will be using our technology. These are all things that I developed as a nurse, but that have been critical to my drive as a businesswoman.

As the world faces its greatest challenge of our lifetimes, leaders that see the world from different perspectives is essential. Leaders that have a fusion of compassion and a fierce drive to create an impact is needed.

The Academy of Medical Sciences have created a Future Leaders in Innovation, Enterprise and Research (FLIER) which I’m honoured to be part of. The two-year programme brings together a cohort of emerging leaders drawn from across academia, industry, the NHS and government/policy organisations and aims to equip emerging leaders with skills to help solve the biggest health challenges that we face, and enabling them to seize opportunities afforded to us by new discoveries in science, technology and medicine.

Much like the value of inclusion and diversity, I believe that the value of a fusion of experience is essential to drive through the changes that we now need to see in the world.