Meet the Waiting Room Team

Dr Rachel James - Senior Responsible Officer

A Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Rachel James trained at the Tavistock before returning in 2003 to work across a range of clinical services at the Trust, becoming its Clinical Services Director in 2022.  Rachel believes in personalised care and is committed to promoting an agile, thoughtful response to the challenges within mental health and the wellbeing landscape.

Freddie Peel - Head of Strategy and Transformation 

Fred is a manager with over 15 years’ experience in local mental health services and is deeply committed to advancing mental health care in the UK.  With experience in clinic operations, business analysis, project and programme management, user experience design, product management, service mobilisation, quality improvement and strategy, Fred is a proud generalist.

With a business development mindset and an interest in all things Lean, he favours Agile principles and a visual collaboration and management approach in all his work. Fred’s fascinated by emerging AI and XR technologies and has high hopes for their potential to improve care, prevention and training in mental healthcare.

He is passionate about the power of design thinking, visual collaboration and co-production to transform how healthcare is delivered.

Dr Rosa Town - Network Lead

Dr Rosa Town is the Network Lead for Waiting Room, helping everyone understand the wellbeing options available to them or someone they’re supporting. She manages both our growing community of practice and all aspects of the platform’s technical operations.

Rosa has extensive experience designing, conducting, analysing, and reporting on evaluations of clinical, community and school-based mental health services. Having completed her MSc in developmental psychology and clinical practice with distinction at the Anna Freud Centre and University College London (UCL), she went on to recently complete her PhD at UCL in child and adolescent mental health.

Rosa’s professional interests include self-management, LGBTQ+ adolescents’ emotional health, shared decision making, service development and digital wellbeing interventions. In her spare time, she enjoys doing yoga, reading fiction and travelling to new and interesting places.

Hannah Benn Gordon - Website Manager

Hannah is the Website Manager for Waiting Room, supporting young people, their families and professionals understand and access wellbeing options available to them.

Hannah’s background spans various roles in the charity sector and in primary care. More recently, she worked as an assistant psychologist for the KeepingWell NCL Hub, a service providing support to health and social care staff across NCL and as a research assistant evaluating CAMHS services in NCL. Hannah believes in the important role that service user involvement and co-production play in the development and improvement of mental health service delivery.

Hannah’s passion lies in integrating therapeutic practices with proficient project management skills to tackle social inequalities, integrating co-design practices, and embedding trauma-informed ways of working at all levels. She loves running, being with her friends and travelling the world (she recently got back from a 4 month trip across Asia).

Nia - Community Consultant

Nia is from London, studying Medicine and has always had an interest in making mental health accessible and understandable for young people from a range of backgrounds, especially BAME. Nia wanted to get involved in developing NCL Waiting Room because it provided her with the unique opportunity of actively being able to see her input and ideas of how to better one’s mental health support progress from her own firsthand experience and relationship with therapy and counselling. 

Hannah Gray - Community Consultant

Hannah is a research assistant in the Division of Psychiatry at University College London, and she is interested in social approaches to understanding and supporting mental health. Hannah wanted to get involved in developing NCL Waiting Room because she is excited about the potential for the service to offer a source of support during the difficult time that many young people spend waiting to access therapy. 

Arshan - Community Consultant

Arshan is from Camden, studying Health and Social Care and interested in systematic change that will better the holistic care for young people. Arshan wanted to get involved in developing NCL Waiting Room as his personal experience with CAMHS is much alike the countless other young people still on the waitlist for an assessment and wanted to be a part of the initial team that’s shaping a potentially life-changing support ‘app’, so to speak, like NCL Waiting Room.