Tessa Davis: Barts Health inspiring women
For International Women’s Day this year (March 8, 2020), we are profiling inspiring women from around our organisation. Today we meet Tessa Davis, Paediatrics Emergency Department Consultant at The Royal London Hospital.
Tessa’s seventeen years in paediatrics has included diverse experience in both the UK and Australia.
She has had a long and varied training pathway including four years in Sydney Children’s Hospital during her time living in Australia.
Tessa has now been back in the UK for three years and has recently qualified as a Paediatric Emergency Consultant, something which she says has been her greatest achievement to date, alongside setting up Don’t Forget the Bubbles (DFTB), a paediatric educational resource and conference, where paediatric healthcare professionals from across the world can share knowledge with their peers.
Tessa said: “I was very excited to join the team at The Royal London Paediatric Emergency Department. The work is both interesting and challenging. For me, having a job where you look forward to coming to work each day and seeing your colleagues is so important. I’m very lucky.”
“Sydney had great weather, nice surf, and it’s a lovely place to bring up children - but it’s very far from home.”
“My teams inspire me. I work in a number of different teams in RLH, my job at QMUL, YourStance, and DFTB. We are all part of lots of small teams, but we are also part of a large paediatric emergency community around the world – at DFTB we aim to connect this community together.”
“I’ve recently visited some colleagues in Kenya. They practice in a country where paediatric emergency is not yet a specialty and they are building a training programme from scratch. My hope is that DFTB and RLH will be able to work with them more in the coming years.”
To change the world for the better, Tessa would have greater female representation in leadership positions for both clinical and non-clinical roles.
She said: “Having a meaningful connection with the people you work with and having positive female role models in leadership positions is very important to me.
“Here at The Royal London we have good female representation across Trauma, the Emergency Department and in the Paediatric Emergency Department - this inspires other women to attain leadership positions.”
“I would say that ensuring the whole team is happy and united in the current climate is my greatest challenge. We are all facing the everyday stresses of working in the NHS, but as consultants it’s important to ensure we have a team who feel happy and supported, and for people to feel valued as individuals."
“Small things can make a difference – here in ED we have an initiative called ‘Getting to Know You’ where we ask our new junior doctors to tell us about themselves before they start. This allows us to learn about their skills, their worries, and their hopes for their time with us.”
“To balance work and family life I make sure I have time where I can focus on my family when I’m not distractible, and I also prioritise my own wellbeing – so no mobile phones at mealtimes or after a certain time in the evening!”
Read more about Don’t Forget the Bubbles.