I provide extra support to help people live as well as possible, for as long as they have left

The short version

I trained in medicine in London and started out as a junior doctor in Cambridge, before coming to the United States for family medicine residency and a fellowship in hospice and palliative medicine.

For six years I worked in rural central Pennsylvania, where I built a palliative care service from nothing and taught residents and medical students. In 2025 I moved back to California. I’m now in San Diego, working with an inpatient palliative care team and building an outpatient clinic.

How I found palliative care

In England, asking someone what they wanted at the end of their life was simply part of the job. I spent my foundation year in geriatrics, and those conversations happened constantly - not as a crisis, not as a special event, just as ordinary medicine. It was so ingrained in me that I didn’t realize it was a skill until I left.

Then I started family medicine residency in the United States, and nobody was having them. Patients were being treated thoroughly and competently, but I couldn’t find anyone sitting down to ask what they actually wanted. So I did it myself. After rounds I’d go back and talk with my patients, get to know them, work out what mattered to them - long conversations that no one else seemed to be having.

The more I looked into palliative care, the more I found in it. It is a field with far more to it than I expected - one that keeps growing, and one full of opportunities to educate. And helping people at such a vulnerable time in their lives is incredibly rewarding.

Why I do this work

Working in palliative care fills a gap in health care that I often feel no one else can fill.

Sometimes that means explaining complex medical care to a family member sitting in the ICU. Sometimes it’s talking with a patient who has cancer about whether they want to continue treatment. Sometimes it’s managing symptoms for someone who is dying, so that they are comfortable and their dignity is intact.

Patients have autonomy. Just because a treatment is available doesn’t mean they have to do it. Choosing comfort over suffering is a choice many people make - and palliative care supports patients either way, whether they continue treatment or not.

Without a palliative care team member in the room, those gaps stay open - for patients, and for the families beside them.

When I first considered this field, my own reaction was the one I now spend my career correcting: that sounds like such a sad job. Doing it has taught me the opposite. The situations are sad - what my patients are facing is sad, and the ways health care fails people are genuinely sad. But getting to do this work in such a vulnerable space is deeply rewarding, and that is what keeps me going.

What I believe

I believe that anyone living with a serious illness - cancer, dementia, ALS, or anything else that is genuinely getting in the way of their quality of life - should be able to ask for early palliative care. And where their doctors are able to offer it, they should.

I believe people should talk about what they do and do not want from their medical care as early as possible. And that they should write those wishes down, early too.

Away from the hospital

I’m usually with my family, planning something social, or keeping up with friends scattered across the world.

If you’d like to work together, get in touch.