Our team

Fiona Jones

Founding Director and CEO of Bridges, Professor of Rehabilitation, Faculty of Health Social Care and Education, St George’s University of London and Kingston University.

Fiona combines her work to lead and oversee the direction and quality of Bridges Self-Management with her academic role as Professor of Rehabilitation Research within the Faculty of Health, Social Care and Education at Kingston and St Georges Universities. Fiona has worked in a variety of clinical roles in acute and community rehabilitation and became interested in self-management research after completing her MSc in 1997 and a PhD in 2005. This led to the development of the Bridges stroke self-management programme. Her work has now extended into many different areas with a focus on advancing the quality of self-management support for different stakeholders and developing programmes suitable for both acute and community healthcare settings.

Lucinda Brimicombe

Lucinda develops, delivers and evaluates Bridges training programmes for practitioners as well as contributing to the day-to-day running of Bridges.  She enjoys working with practitioners to challenge and change their practice and is interested in many areas of rehabilitation and implementation science.  Her background is in neurological rehabilitation where she worked as a Physiotherapist in the NHS for 10 years, and she has a Masters of Research in Clinical Practice from St. George's University of London. She joined Bridges in October 2013 after being involved in delivering Bridges training for 4 years, alongside her clinical role.

Heide Pöstges

Heide manages and conducts research for bespoke Bridges projects and facilitates workshops. She hopes that her previous experience in user involvement in the charity sector will come in useful to strengthen the existing foundations for user involvement at Bridges. Heide’s background is in medical anthropology / sociology and she conducted health-related research in England and overseas. She has also trained and worked as physiotherapist.

Stefan Tino Kulnik

Tino qualified as a physiotherapist in Austria in 1999 and worked clinically in rehabilitation across neurology, elderly and respiratory care in inpatient and community settings. Tino first learned about the Bridges approach to self-management in 2010, when he attended one of Fiona’s workshops. Tino completed his PhD in Clinical Neuroscience at King’s College London in 2015, and he now works for Bridges Self-Management Ltd in project management and research support.

Chrissy Stonebridge

Chrissy is Bridges’ senior office manager, she supports the team in numerous ways and ensures there is always someone to act as a point of contact for anyone who needs information or about how Bridges works. Chrissy brings many talents and skills, she has worked in the creative industry as an Account Manager and for a national music charity as their Manager and Administrator. Chrissy is a key support for our large scale studies and helps the team with project management and budgeting. She enjoys being the friendly hub around which the Bridges team can thrive and concentrate on increasing the spread and impact of our programmes.

Bridges Associate trainers work primarily in the NHS as senior practitioners and come from all areas of rehabilitation and healthcare. They support training and provide excellent links to real life experiences of working in teams that support people with acute and long term conditions.

Tess Baird

Tess wrote her MSc dissertation about goal setting, which remains her clinical interest. She was inspired by the Bridges training session she attended, which fitted well with the beliefs she had outlined in her MSc. Tess became a Bridges workshop facilitator in 2009, and is particularly interested in integrating self-management philosophy into service design through research and service delivery. In Tower Hamlets, Tess has also been involved in a study examining perceptions of practitioners of using the Bridges programme with Bengali stroke survivors.

Katie Campion

Katie became involved in Bridges after completing the ‘Life After Stroke’ masters module in 2012 run by Fiona. She was inspired by the liberated and effective approach and became an associate trainer in 2014. As a physiotherapist she has used the ‘Bridges principles’ extensively in clinical practice, in both community and in patient settings. With a previous degree in Philosophy and Psychology Katie has a particular interest in health beliefs and exercise behaviours, which she is pursuing in the completion of her Masters in Clinical Research investigating physical activity and muscle disease.

Karen Coster

Karen joined the team of Bridges Trainers in 2014 following attending training and use of the Bridges Self-Management programme in the Tower Hamlets Stroke Pathway since 2012. Through her clinical practice she has gained experience of the many benefits as well as challenges in using the Bridges programme across a stroke pathway and within a diversely ethnic borough.

Romayne Orr

Romayne is an Occupational Therapist working in a Community Brain Injury Team in Northern Ireland. She first became involved with Bridges in 2009 when she assisted Fiona Jones in a RCT evaluating Bridges Self-management intervention in a Community Stroke Team. Since then she has used the Bridges approach extensively in her clinical practice and is convinced of the benefits to her clients and is passionate about training other professionals to work in this way. Romayne joined the Bridges Team as an Associate Trainer in 2014.

Carole Pound

Carole has been a member of the Bridges Advisory Group since its inception and also helps co-facilitate Bridges training as an Associate Trainer. She trained as a Speech and Language therapist about a hundred years ago. Within her training role she combines her practitioner experiences in health, social care and the voluntary sector with more recent ventures researching the social impacts of acquired neurodisability. She hopes a career long interest in communication disability, managing long term conditions in creative ways and humanising approaches to receiving and delivering services adds a nourishing little 'je ne sai quoi' to the Bridges approach.

Other supporters of Bridges

Leigh Hale

Leigh works with Bridges to adapt and deliver Bridges in New Zealand. She is a Professor and Dean of the School of Physiotherapy / Centre for Health, Activity, and Rehabilitation Research at the University of Otago, New Zealand and the Editor of the New Zealand Journal of Physiotherapy. She primarily researches in the area of community-based physiotherapeutic rehabilitation for people living with disability and with neurological conditions, such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease.

Sue Newman

Sue works with the Laura Fergusson Trust Canterbury, New Zealand, to deliver the Bridges Stroke programme to clients in the community since 2013. She has extensive experience working with people after stroke and traumatic brain injury and has delivered Bridges to clients individually and within a group setting. She has an interest in working with clients to promote their active involvement within the interdisciplinary team rehabilitation process. Sue initially trained as a Physiotherapist and became interested in rehabilitation and how the client may drive the rehabilitation process after completing her post graduate rehabilitation diploma with Otago University in 2002.