Conference 2016: Keynote Speakers

	Dr Mervyn Eastman (Conference Chair) Co-Founder Change AGEnts Network President Practitioner Alliance for Safeguarding Adults (PASA). Mervyn is a regular contributor to conferences and lecturer at universities mixing serious thought on social care, health and public sector services with humour. Author of numerous publications on a range of issues related to public services and older people, he was the first person, outside the United States, to publish a book on the then little acknowledged issue of elder abuse in the domestic setting.
	Dr Janice LeBel Director of System Transformation, Massachusetts Department of Mental Health. Dr LeBel has more than 25 years’ experience in the public sector working primarily in mental health, but also child welfare, juvenile justice and intellectual and developmental disability. She leads the Department of Mental Health’s nationally recognised Restraint/Seclusion Prevention Initiative in the United States.
	Norman Lamb *MP for North Norfolk and Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Health.* Following the 2010 General Election Norman served first as Chief Parliamentary Advisor to Nick Clegg, then as a junior minister at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, before being promoted to Minister of State for Care and Support for the Department of Health. He continues to challenge the government to ensure that health and social care and in particular mental health gets treated with the same priority as physical health.
	Maria Taylor *Vice Principal, Wishmore Cross Academy.* Maria is Vice Principal with Directorate responsibility for Performance and Resources at Wishmore Cross Academy, a special school for young people with social, emotional and mental health difficulties.
	Craig Thorley *Senior Fellow, Institute for Public Policy Research.* Craig leads the Institute’s work on mental health policy. He has written widely on mental health, and public services more broadly, and most recently authored Education, Education , Mental Health – which examined the role of secondary schools in helping to meet pupils’ mental health needs.
	Dr Fintan Sheerin *Assistant Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences, Trinity College, Dublin.* Dr Sheerin has extensive experience of nursing across a number of fields, including behavioural intellectual disability. He was a recipient of an All-Ireland Nursing Research Fellowship in 1999, under which he undertook his PhD. This work uniquely brought together nursing informatics and intellectual disability nursing in an attempt to delineate the core interventional components of specialist intellectual disability nursing.
	Sam O’Brien *RESPECT Instructor at NAViGO and Expert By Experience.* Sam sat on the steering group that developed the workplace guidelines: “A Positive and Proactive Workforce”. At the launch of Positive and Safe, she delivered a speech about her personal experience of unnecessary restrictive practice and how this impacted her long-term mental health.
	Paul Dix Chief Executive Officer, Pivotal Education. Paul is a speaker, author and teacher trainer who has worked with the most difficult behaviours in the most challenging schools, referral units and colleges for the last 25 years. He has advised the Department for Education on Teacher Standards, given evidence to the Education Select Committee and done extensive work with the Ministry of Justice on Behaviour and Restraint in Youth Custody.
	Dr Anna Bjorkdahl Karolinska Institute, Stockholm. Dr Bjorkdahl is a psychiatric nurse with a professional background in different types of psychiatric in-patient settings. In collaboration with the Karolinska Institute and the Stockholm County Council, she has recently established a new research group that focuses on intervention based psychiatric nursing research.
	Professor Brian Littlechild Research Lead, Dept of Nursing and Social Work, University of Hertfordshire. Vice President, European Research Institute for Social Work, University of Ostrava. Professor Littlechild has a long-standing commitment to the development of the profession of social work, and social work research, education and training, and co-production and risk assessment in mental health and children’s work.
	Phil Howell Development Manager, BILD. Phil has extensive experience of working closely with the Department of Health, CQC and National Behaviour Strategy Groups to ensure positive behaviour support programmes are implemented across health and social care to improve and reduce restraint related practice.
	Inspector Michael Brown OBE Mental Health Coordinator, College of Policing. Michael is the Mental Health Coordinator at the College of Policing and a serving officer with West Midlands Police. He has worked on mental health in policing for over a decade, driving the creation of ‘Place of Safety’ services which have spared thousands of people the indignity of detention in custody. He is a recipient of the President’s Medal from the Royal College of Psychiatrists for his significant contribution to improving the lives of people with mental illness and in 2016 was appointed an OBE in the 90^th Birthday Honours.
	Linda Hume Behaviour Support Lead, National Autistic Society. Linda currently works as the National Lead for Behaviour Support with the National Autistic Society. This is a national post bringing together a team of skilled practitioners to develop and lead on an organisational approach to positive behaviour support. As part of this role Linda also works as a lecturer with Edinburgh Napier University leading the delivering of postgraduate modules on Positive Behaviour Support.Previous roles have included commissioning and developing community based services for with challenging behaviour both with the voluntary sector and health service. This has included developing and managing a specialist Positive Behaviour Support Team within the NHS. The British Institute of Learning Disabilities (BILD) awarded this team winner of innovation in practice in 2012 for their role in the reduction of the use of restrictive practices in health care settings.