Biography
Dr Sandra Sharp is a registered nurse in the UK, and Singapore, and until recently was registered in Australia. In addition to specialist qualifications in critical care nursing, she completed a Master of Advanced Nursing Practice in 2007 at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. She completed her PhD in 2016 at Central Queensland University, which was a critical ethnography examining barriers and facilitators to person-centred care delivery in acute services.
Her clinical background is intensive care, coronary care, and acute medicine, both in the UK and Australia. In 2009 whilst working as a senior nurse in Australia, Sandra led the strategic educational response to critical care pandemic preparedness in her health board. At this time Sandra also led the statewide transition to critical care programme, supporting educators and learners in practice.
Since entering academia Sandra has developed expertise and national recognition in nursing leadership and education. Nationally, she has contributed to the work of the Clinical Skills Managed Education Network (CSMEN), producing educational resources for use throughout Scotland. Locally Sandra led the development of a continuing professional development course in clinical decision making and leads the BSc Nursing programme in Singapore. Her teaching interests include nursing leadership, acute care and clinical skills.
Most recently Sandra has contributed to work developing a minimal data set for the Scottish Government to enable spiritual care interventions to be quantified and evaluated. This work was necessary to ensure funding availability, and to support chaplains and others to deliver person centred spiritual care. Other national interests include her role as a public partner with Healthcare Improvement Scotland contributing to the development of patient facing information and clinical guidelines.
Sandra is an academic adviser on a NHS workforce development project enabling strong links between clinical practice and academia. Sandra’s role is to facilitate the dissemination of outputs from the project, and has led the development of conference abstract submissions, and papers for publication. This work has gained national interest and led to the development of the new band 4 nursing role.
Sandra currently supervises two PhD students and one professional doctorate student and has supported numerous MSc students in dissertation submission.