Bernie has a clinical background in nursing and has held a number of senior roles within the NHS over the last 30+ years, focusing on change management,  leadership  and implementation across various sectors in the NHS and business, utilising her MBA as part of these roles. 

Bernie has project managed the first phase of the infrastructure development of the £3 million Leicester Diabetes Centre. She has also been instrumental in transforming diabetes services for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland, as a whole-systems approach which developed a new model of care that was short-listed for the Health Service Journal Awards .

She has taken the lead role in the implementations of the Desmond structured education programme for people living with diabetes,  both nationally and internationally embedding it into health care systems.

Based at the Leicester Diabetes centre, this provides the ideal platform for implementation at scale. The research from the Leicester group is phenomenal, and implementing the outputs of this research into the real world is one of her main accomplishments.