Medicine taught me to see the whole system. Coaching changed how I help its leaders.

A doctor and an executive coach, at the same time

Alexandra is a UK-trained physician who has practiced medicine since 2006 and qualified as a GP in 2011. She has coached healthcare leaders since 2017, and she continues clinical work alongside her coaching practice. That is the deliberate part: she has not left medicine to talk about it.

Medical training and career

Nearly twenty years in practice, including general practice from 2011, has given her a working understanding of how healthcare organizations actually behave — how decisions get made, where accountability blurs, and what it costs a clinician to carry organizational responsibility on top of clinical responsibility.

Leadership and management experience

Alexandra has practiced as a family doctor and has led a family doctor practice — running a clinical business, with the staffing, financial and partnership realities that involves. She has held leadership positions within the NHS, the United Kingdom’s state healthcare system, one of the largest and most complex healthcare organizations in the world.

She has also worked as a doctor appraiser, formally reviewing the practice and development of other physicians. That role matters more than it may first appear: appraising a peer, honestly and usefully, is very close to the work of coaching one. It requires the same combination of clinical credibility, structured questioning and willingness to say the difficult thing kindly.

The transition her clients are going through — from respected clinician to person accountable for other people, budgets and outcomes — is one she has made herself, more than once, rather than one she has read about.

Why she began coaching healthcare leaders

The pattern that led here is a familiar one: excellent clinicians promoted for their clinical excellence, then left to work out an entirely different job on their own. Generic leadership development rarely lands with them, because it does not account for clinical identity, for leading former peers, or for the particular weight of decisions that affect patients as well as budgets.

What continuing clinical practice contributes

Credibility, first — a physician leader will engage differently with a coach who still practices. But more usefully, it keeps her current. She is not describing a healthcare system as it was when she left it, because she has not left it.

Coaching credentials and methods

Alexandra is a Board Certified Coach and a practitioner of both the Hogan 360° instrument and the MBTI. Her practice is aligned with the ICF Core Competencies and Code of Ethics. Her approach follows a defined five-stage structure — Align, Assess, Coach, Apply, Review — with sponsor contracting and participant confidentiality agreed in writing at the outset.

Personal approach

Direct, calm and commercially minded. Clients are not treated as problems to be fixed; they are treated as capable people doing a genuinely difficult job who benefit from an independent thinking partner willing to challenge them. The work is practical and applied to what is actually on their desk.

Professional standards and ethics

Coaching is a professional development service. It is not medical care, psychotherapy, diagnosis or treatment. Alexandra’s medical experience informs her understanding of healthcare context; she does not act as the participant’s doctor within a coaching engagement. Where a conversation surfaces something that belongs with a clinician or a therapist, she refers rather than extends her scope.