Professor Heather Caudle, with over 30 years of clinical and leadership practice at organisational, regional, and national levels across the NHS, has been an executive Chief Nursing Officer across a range of settings for the past 11 years: an acute trust, a mental health trust, and most recently, the CNO of the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust. From 2020 to 2025 she was also the Chair of the Nola Ishmael Executive Nurses Group nationally, formerly known as the Global Majority Chief Nursing Officers Group.

She has held strategic chair roles, namely as chair of the Greater Manchester Nursing, Midwifery and AHP Workforce Oversight Committee, which involves hosting a partnership strategy group of all NHS provider organisations and Higher Education Institutes across Greater Manchester; and was the interim chair of the Institute of Family Therapy. March 2024 to December 2024.

From a nursing perspective, nationally, Heather directed NHS England’s readiness for the first major transformative changes to child protection legislation in England brought about by the Children and Social Work Act 2017. In addition, as Director and Regional Representative of the National Mental Health Nurse Directors’ Forum, in partnership with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), led the development of national Ligature Risk clinical safety standards for mental health inpatient settings: 2018 to 2022.

Speaking to her commitment to collaborative improvement, she led the implementation of the “London Mental Health Compact” amongst all emergency departments in acute hospitals and mental health trusts in London to improve patient flow across acute inpatient services, and latterly developed regional guidance, “Surrounding Counties and London Compact: Access and Flow Escalation Protocol”, to improve cross-border patient flows into London from the counties surrounding.

Professor Caudle is committed to the academic rigour underpinning equity and inclusion interventions for nursing as evidenced by research activity, which includes her co-authorship of “Melting the Snowy White Peaks: The needs, expectations and experiences of Black, Asian and minority ethnic student nurses to support equitable nursing education and career progression” (Sept 2023), an anti-racism framework, and practise proposal with significant implications for health and social care.