Esther Murray (Queen Mary University of London)

woman

Election address

I have been working in the field of moral injury and the psychological wellbeing of healthcare practitioners since 2015.  Increasingly, and overwhelmingly during the pandemic, I have felt that I ought to be turning my attention to the psychological wellbeing of my fellow academic and professional services colleagues.  At least in the NHS, leaders know that their staff are in trouble and know enough to ask for help.  There's little to none of that in HE.  The clearest examples of the failure to recognise staff wellbeing have been during the pandemic, and some of the decisions not to protect and champion staff as human beings have irrevocably changed my perception of my workplace.

I am a senior lecturer in Health Psychology at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, QMUL.  I've been a UCU member since around 2008, when I was at London Metropolitan University watching union reps get hounded from their jobs. We are seeing a rise in this again across the country, with some very inflammatory statements being made in the press.   I am under no illusions about the relationships between unions and management in the neoliberal university, but I am more worried by the fractious relationships within UCU.  I joined http://www.ucucommons.org/ and am proud to run in these elections with them because I believe we can create a more inclusive and more effective union together.

Not everyone raises their political voice in the same way, not everyone wants to shout to be heard.  Just as we see with our students, there are many ways in which we can and should engage the people in the room. I am keen to help create a union which is diverse from a disciplinary perspective, to increase the membership among my medical education and STEM colleagues. In a further effort to include all those whose voices should be heard, I would like to work towards better inclusion and opportunities for participation for neurodivergent members and would use my position to work towards this. 'If we do what we always did, we get what we always got' to paraphrase Einstein. A vote for me and for any of my colleagues on the UCU Commons slate, is a vote for change.

@EM_HealthPsych