Dr Barbara Gale

Dr Barbara Gale MBE is a Visiting Senior Fellow in Integrated Care for the Integrated Care Academy. 

Barbara has 40 years’ experience working in end of life care, with a background in nursing, palliative care and systemic family therapy. Most recently, she was Chief Executive of St Nicholas Hospice Care from 2007 to 2021, developing innovative models of care, built on public health and asset based community development approaches to palliative care.

Barbara was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in Palliative Care from Lancaster University in 2018. Her thesis explored the experiences of community hospice volunteers and how visiting dying people provided transformative experiences for the volunteers, but working with a rigid bureaucratic system was detrimental to their experiences.

In 2018, Barbara was awarded an MBE for services to hospice care and the Suffolk community.

Barbara is passionate about ensuring that everyone is better equipped to face death and grief and is currently supporting a project in the ICS to implement an electronic advance care plan, where patients have access to their record via an App.