Allison is a registered general nurse, specialist practitioner (general practice nursing) with experience of working in a broad range of health and social care settings ranging from adult social care to strategic health authority. The focus for her work has always been patient safety, quality improvement, service redesign and development. Having worked for many years as a “lead nurse” with responsibility for promoting excellence in clinical practice, her achievements include establishing a career start programme for practice nurses and a graduate level nurse practitioner programme, the redesign of community hospital services, the development of integrated health and social care locality teams and intermediate care services. Having worked at system level in a variety of roles she has expertise in relation to management of large scale change and the challenges of managing change and transition across different organisations with differing priorities and unique cultural characteristics. She also has expertise in relation to a plethora of quality improvement methodologies such as North-East Transformation System, Virginia Mason Production System, Model for Large Scale Change. She used this expertise to successfully lead the design, delivery and programme management of an improvement programme appropriate to the needs of the North-East region and aligned to the Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention priorities. More recently she has worked at CQC where she has lead cross functional teams to co-produce, design and deliver three national reviews; end of life, diabetes and mental health services for children and young people. She has also been chair of CQCs Carers Equality Network. On 24 June 2019 she joined St Cuthbert's Hospice as Head of Clinical/Deputy Chief Executive.

Outside of work she is happiest holding family gatherings and enjoying the beauty of North East England with her boys, their partners, her husband John, Romanian rescue dog Rodney and Jack Russell Kong.