Karen is the first Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland.
Internationally recognised leader in complex care delivery, and patient safety transformation. Karen brings deep operational and strategic experience in designing, implementing, and scaling large acute care-at-home programmes across both urban and rural health systems in the UK’s NHS and the United States.
Karen is widely regarded as a strategic visionary in the redesign of acute services, pioneering models that shift high-acuity care safely into patients’ homes while maintaining clinical quality, governance, and safety standards. She created and grew one of the world’s first reported oncology specialty hospital-at-home programmes, demonstrating measurable improvements in patient outcomes while embedding robust safety frameworks and risk governance at scale.
Her work has consistently focused on ensuring that innovation in care delivery strengthens, rather than compromises, patient safety and equity of access. She regularly speaks nationally and internationally on hospital-at-home, complex care redesign, patient safety systems, and the future of safe, scalable care beyond the hospital walls
In 2016, Karen was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship, enabling her to study acute care-at-home models in Australia and New Zealand. She has authored multiple peer-reviewed publications, including a recent article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology demonstrating improved patient outcomes from the Huntsman Oncology Hospital-at-Home programme.