Dr Gavin Tucker
Gavin graduated from Medicine at Trinity College Dublin in 2017, where he received the Foundation Scholarship and an MSc in Molecular Medicine. He has just finished Core Psychiatry Training at the Maudsley Training Programme and completed the MRCPsych exams. During training, he was elected President of the Junior Doctors Committee, representing over 100 core psychiatry trainees across two large mental health trusts. He led a committee of 20 people and provided oversight of projects ranging from trainee education, rota design, and charity initiatives. During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, he sat on the Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust Clinical Senate with senior clinical leaders to create trust-wide clinical policies in response to national guidance on the pandemic. He also sat on the programme board for the pilot of the first ever e-prescribing system to be implemented in a UK mental health trust, a major patient safety initiative which launched in early 2022.
In 2021 his co-authored textbook A Guide To Psychiatric Examination was published by Elsevier and has received international acclaim from world leaders in psychiatry. In the same year he organised the first ever UK-wide psychiatry school for Year 12 students from widening participation backgrounds, which had 90 attendees from all four nations of the UK.
He is currently working on a systematic review and meta-analysis of risk factors for suicide and self-harm in children, and studying the mental health of children in a mixed subsistence-forager tribe in northern Tanzania.
He enjoys middle-distance running, piano, and cooking.
Reason for applying for the scheme
Gavin wants to devote his career to child and adolescent psychiatry. His goal is engaging people to care about the mental health and wellbeing of young people. The child psychiatry referral rates in the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the system vulnerabilities in mental health services for young people like nothing before. Although the virus itself is a major contributor, he wants to learn about the wider social, political and economic factors in population health that drive referral spikes like this.
He wants to understand how healthcare systems work on these problems on a national scale, how healthcare systems interact with politics and policy, the role of clear stakeholder engagement, and public-facing communication.
He has a record of engaging people to work on projects larger than their individual teams, and he wants to build this engagement on a regional and national level. He wants to work with different agencies with differing priorities, thinking about how to work with commissioners, policymakers and the public in giving all of our young people the best possible start in life. He want to be challenged by new ideas and new ways of working, at the same interrogating and learning how to better articulate his own core values.
