About us – Involve Me Digital Health

Our Director

Alicia Ridout is a Health and Care Professions Council registered occupational therapist (OT), an active member of the Royal College of Occupational Therapists (RCOT), and a Fellow of the Faculty of Clinical Informatics (FCI). She is also a member of the Independent Practice Specialist Section of RCOT in Yorkshire and part of the York & North Yorkshire Growth Hub. As a Clinical Safety Officer, she regularly joins the FCI special interest group with colleagues working in the same role across the UK and provides mentorship.

Alicia qualified as an OT in 1989 at Oxford Brookes University, achieving a merit in a MSc in Professional Health studies in 2004 at YSJ University. She is currently a part time doctoral student at YSJ, exploring digital clinical safety relating to the deployment and use of AI/IoT technologies with older people accessing OT services. She is also lead for a research project funded by the Casson Trust to deploy her webapp, COG-OT+ with students/preceptors.

Alicia has a portfolio career including experiences working in the NHS, private healthcare, 3^rd sector, Higher Education and commercial sectors. She has worked in national roles and most recently in an Integrated Care System supporting regional service improvement in head and neck cancer services with AHPs.

Alicia is also an active member of Rotary, fundraising for local charities and is the Senior Independent Director/Vice Chair of a Social Housing Association Board of Directors.

Key roles:

Since establishing her consultancy practice, Alicia has worked for Health Education England, the Casson Trust, Bradford University, York St John University and is providing CSO services and director level support to ETHOS Ltd, experts in regulatory support for the health and care technology sector. She has led their development of strategic innovations and knowledge transfer, research portfolio developments and works closely with the CEO, Stuart Harrison who authored the English Clinical Safety standards. Alicia has also won a series of funding bids to build, develop and evaluate a web app built for OTs to support digital practice development (COG-OT). This work is being presented at national and international academic conferences. Her vlog on writing a business case can be found on the Elizabeth Casson Trust site here. Alicia is also a member of the LEP funded, York & North Yorkshire Growth Hub, based at York St John University Enterprise Centre (https://www.ynygrowthhub.com/).

Alicia led the team that co-designed, developed and ran MindWell Leeds, a ground-breaking mental health website which won multiple awards. She won the Chief Allied Health Professionals Officer inaugural Digital Innovator of the year in 2017 in recognition of this work. She is the inventor of LOOP, Leeds open online platform, which was developed to a citywide prototype to improve the back-end management of self-management information for staff and citizens, supporting the early use of Open Referral data standard. Alicia led programmes of work such as OurGP for the Scottish Government and many SBRI and NIHR research and development projects working directly with citizens and staff.

HEIF funded programme of work from early-stage idea generation/research team development to impact generation and REF support. Alicia successfully set-up and ran a 3-year programme which helped to leverage a multimillion-pound portfolio of work. She led the creation, with a colleague, of LeedsACTS! (academic collaboration with the 3^rd sector in Leeds) which won awards and continues to this day, supporting seed funding and citizen focused collaborations in the city. She chaired an MRC Advisory group and carried out funded work with carers with a Northern Eight (N8) academic team.

Awards and Presentations:

2022 World Federation of Occupational Therapists conference, Paris, poster presentation of the COG-OT proof-of-concept project with novice OTs
2022 FCI Academic conference e-poster presentations i) COG-OT+ Competency Mapping work and ii) Use of the NASSS-CAT with an Innovate UK COVID19 response funded smart wristband deployment with University of Leeds
2022 RCOT Conference presentation: Critical Discourse – The application of competency frameworks to occupational therapy digital practice: mission impossible?
2022 NHS Digital CSO Community of Practice Key note (May): Innovation & Clinical Safety: it’s a mission. And its personal.
2021 OT Show poster presentation: COG-OT development and deployment impacts
2021 Casson Trust Research Award to support evaluation of COG-OT+ : A support package for novice OTs across their first year in practice
2021 Sheffield Hallam University Educators Conference AHPs: presentation COG-OT.
2021 FCI Academic Conference e-poster winner for COG-OT animation of the project
2021 RCOT Tunstall Innovation Award for COG-OT
2020 Casson Trust COVID 19 response funding for proof-of-concept COG-OT
Fellowship of Faculty of Informatics
2018 World Federation of Occupational Therapists (WFOT) conference, Cape Town, S Africa poster presentations: i) Use of the Kawa Model in BRIGHT Trial (NIHR:15/166) and ii) OT Co-design work SBRI funded ‘Let Me Show You’ app for disabled young people.
2018 Casson Trust funding award to attend WFOT conference
2017 CAHPO Digital Innovator of the year