An interview with the FPOP Bill Downes Award winner

The Bill Downes Award recognises an outstanding psychologist who has worked in older people's services. 

Rosslyn was recognised for her work championing the use of narrative practice with older people for over a decade, along with the key role she plays in promoting and advocating for the psychological needs of older people in Wales and supporting and connecting people in her pursuit of better services. An advocate for the Welsh language in psychology services, Rosslyn was also recognised for her commitment to both learning Welsh and supporting the needs of older people who speak Welsh. 

In this interview, Rosslyn shares how it felt to win the Bill Downes Award, the best parts about her role and her hopes for her forthcoming book. 

Can you tell us a bit about your current role? 

I've been working in Cardiff and Vale since I qualified, which is about 22 years ago. I've always worked with older people, but my role has changed over time. Currently, I do some clinical work in a couple of different services, including the memory and young onset dementia teams, where I contribute to the assessment and diagnosis of dementia and provide psychological therapies for people living with dementia and those who support and care for them.

My role is to be the lead for dementia for clinical psychology in Cardiff and Vale, and my remit covers supporting the psychological care of people living with dementia throughout the healthcare system. This involves working closely with colleagues across different services, including those in mental health services in other parts of the system, to improve the psychological care of people living with dementia and their care partners. 

I'm also involved in training staff in other parts of the system so they can support people with dementia and their families in helpful ways. Part of my role includes teaching, consultations and contributing to service development and improvement. I also manage a little team of psychology staff who input into community services that support people with dementia. I see nurturing and supporting staff as a particularly important part of my role. 

What does a typical day look like for you?

I don't really have a typical day. My work is really varied and days differ depending on whether it's a clinical or management/leadership day and which part of the system I am working in! However, most days will include an element of clinical work, whether direct work conducting assessments, therapy, supervising staff or contributing to multi-disciplinary discussions. Most days will also include project or service improvement work of some kind. 

Recently, I've been involved in a project working with colleagues across the UK to try and pull together a book using narrative therapy with older people. It can be quite challenging to fit in this kind of work, but we have a responsibility to try and evidence and share our practice, so I have made this a priority during 2024, although admittedly most of this has had to be in my own time! 

It's been really lovely to have the opportunity to work with some inspiring and brilliant psychology colleagues and service users from across the UK to share practice. It's been great fun to work closely with my colleagues Elizabeth Field (Kent) and Polly Kaiser (Greater Manchester) my co-editors, in particular. With an approach like narrative therapy, we can't evidence it in the traditional randomised control trial way, so it's been exciting to find other ways to share and reflect on our work together.  

Did you always know that you wanted to work in services for older people?

Not at all actually! Before training, I worked for a youth project for a couple of years and I was really interested in that area. During the period when I was training, all three of my grandparents died and two of them had a diagnosis of dementia. I was very close to my grandparents and I was quite startled and dismayed by some of the care they received and how they were understood in relation to their dementia and their frailty. 

At that time, I was training and was doing an older adult placement and I remember sitting in a lecture where they were talking about the work of Tom Kitwood and person-centred care. There's an emphasis on understanding the person, not just seeing someone as a collection of symptoms and really valuing older people and their life experiences.

This really chimed with me in terms of the experiences I had with my grandparents and my hopes for what good care would look like. I realised that we're thinking a lot more about what an ageist society we live in and how pushed to the edge older people are. I think it was just the way those things came together that made me think, 'This would be a really good area to work in'. The FPOP network was a very inspiring place to be, and it still is, but as a trainee, it was somewhere you felt really valued, encouraged and supported. 

There were some really brilliant role models who brought together compassion and passion and a kind of political astuteness. These were the psychologists who were talking about psychology in much more socio-political terms, which I found a real draw. I ended up doing an elective specialist placement with a colleague who'd really inspired me in terms of work in dementia. I'm still in touch with Caroline Lamers, as we both moved from Sheffield (where she had been my supervisor) to Wales at the same time and she continues to be a key figure in FPOP and the DCP in Wales.

Do you have a favourite aspect of the role you do now?

I think the bit that gives me the greatest reward in my work is the therapeutic work with people living with dementia. The psychotherapeutic work with people with dementia is one of the things that I first got interested in when I was training, and what I did my thesis on. I have always been fascinated to see how psychological therapy can work in the absence of a person's ability to explicitly remember what has been discussed!

That's still what I get excited about, despite all the other bits of my work that I find interesting. 

How did you find out you had won the Bill Downes Award?

It was at the FPOP annual conference. When I heard my name listed as one of the nominations, I was really thrown and genuinely completely astounded. It was actually very emotional because I was listening to what was being explained about the Bill Downes Award and the person that Bill had been. Listening to the story had particular resonance for me this year because I lost a friend over the summer who, like Bill, had died in her 40s and had also worked in older adult psychology. I was also genuinely surprised to find my name alongside those of psychologists I really respect and who do great work. I felt very honoured and quite overwhelmed.

Are there any opportunities you think winning the award will bring?

There was lots of interest and enthusiasm about this award from colleagues in the Health Board where I work! I felt it was really helpful for promoting psychology locally and also for showing that we're doing a good job.

This feels particularly important in a period where there are always questions about what gets funded and developed, so it's helpful to have something like this that highlights that the work we are doing is of value.

What I'm particularly hopeful for is in relation to developing narrative practice, because there's an increasing interest in these ways of working. I think that because narrative therapy approaches were part of the reason I was nominated, it's a way of the older adult psychology community saying: 'There's value in this. This is something we're interested in or appreciate about what you're doing.' Given the criteria that tend to be applied to 'evidencing effectiveness' are impossible to meet with an approach like narrative therapy this feels really important.

I'm hoping it helps pave the way for broadening conversations about that and getting more people interested.

Can you tell us anything more about the book you've been working on?

Narrative therapy literature can be a bit opaque. It can sometimes be very heavy on philosophy, which is really interesting, but sometimes the writing isn't always that accessible. So, Polly, Elizabeth and I, along with other colleagues, have worked on a book to try to write something that's accessible to everybody and brings narrative therapy to life and in the context of working with older people, which we think is a first. 

It is full of examples of real life applications, from the therapy room to community practices and parts are co-written with people with lived experience. It's already been described as a 'wonderful trove of thoughts, ideas and experience' and certainly as editors we wished we had had something like this to draw on earlier in our careers.

It's been a real collaboration. There are loads of people involved in writing, and there has been a lot of back and forth but it's also been a joy!