Ishbel Smith is the founder of communications consultancy, Heart In Mouth, which specialises in working within the Third Sector to enable and empower people to speak confidently and effectively about subjects that matter to them.  Ishbel is passionate about ensuring that individual and shared knowledge is heard, listened to, understood and communicated well.

Knowledge has been at the centre of Ishbel’s eclectic career to date. With over 15 years of experience as a civil litigator, she was involved in a wide variety of cases, many of which were high profile. Specialising in product liability and professional negligence required a keen appreciation of the need to engage with, understand and then use knowledge (be that expert, evidential or professional) in a focussed and result-orientated manner.  Over four years of practice as a knowledge management professional support lawyer gave her a deeper appreciation of how important (but challenging) it was to share knowledge with others effectively.

A subsequent return to university to undertake a theology degree fed her hunger for personal learning as well as allowing her time to venture further into work within the Third Sector.  Heart In Mouth was born from Ishbel’s experience in debating, presentation and communication skills both personally and professionally.  She works with a wide range of clients including the Church of Scotland, The Robertson Trust, deafScotland and Diabetes Scotland.  She is also a trustee of two charities – one an international NGO and the other a local community café.

Ishbel’s keynote session will look at some stories of how knowledge has been utilised as a tool at the practical coal face.  Drawing on her observations of how knowledge has been used (and abused) in the corridors of the courts to commerce to charitable concerns, she will provide an insight into how, when and why knowledge is viewed as a friend or foe.  The session aims to help participants review and reflect with each other on how their stories of knowledge mobilisation plays out in practice.

John Gabbay and Andrée le May, who are both professors emeriti from the University of Southampton, have each devoted their careers to the interface of health services research, practice, education and management. Together they now research how knowledge enters clinical practice, policy & learning, with the aim of understanding how practitioners can more easily use best evidence to improve their everyday work. Since working together to research how different kinds of evidence can improve care, they are perhaps best known for their concept of clinical mindlines. They have also been researching into the skills used for quality improvement, healthcare commissioning and social care, and are now working with the East of England CLAHRC to help implement research findings in local health economies.

Andrée graduated in nursing in 1982.  After gaining her PhD she became interested in how nurses use knowledge in practice and has researched and written in this area ever since.  She has published on evidence-based practice, the dissemination and implementation of research, and the use of communities of practice for improving learning.

John qualified in medicine in 1974 and was foundation director of the Wessex Institute for Health R&D at Southampton.  As a qualitative researcher he has a background in philosophy of science and historical sociology of medicine as well as public health. His interests have always centered on understanding how health professionals use knowledge in practice.