Ep 39 Andrew West

Andrew West is a child and adolescent psychiatrist based in
Oxford. He graduated from Cambridge University with First Class
Honours in Natural Science, Part 1a in Law. He went on to study
Anatomy at Leeds University and then Clinical Medicine at Oxford.
He worked for several years in New Zealand, completing an
internship in Psychotherapy and Counselling there. He completed
Oxford Higher Training in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 1996
and has intermediate level training in Group Therapy with
Children, and Family Systemic Psychotherapy. From 2001 he worked
as a consultant in Child and Adolescent Mental Health and
Paediatric Liaison Psychiatry in Berkshire, including working as
a specialty trainer and consultant appraiser, and for the last
five years consulting to a large independent school. After over
thirty years in the NHS he now holds an honorary contract as a
mentor and coach for NHS staff in the Thames Valley and Wessex
region. He has regularly published work in peer-reviewed journals
including on ethics and uncertainty in clinical practice, and
original research into fathering.


Music has always been an important part of Andrew’s life. In his
teens he undertook a mini-apprenticeship with a luthier, Robert
Raeburn-Smith, which enabled him to build the violin that he
plays to this day. Over the last two years has been playing with
the FMI collective, Oxford Improvisers. He is a project partner
for the Collaborating Centre for Values Based Practice in Health
and Social Care at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he has
led and contributed to seminars on the nature of evidence,
listening, and the role of improvisation and aesthetics in
clinical work. His book Being With and Saying Goodbye:
Cultivating Therapeutic Attitude in Professional Practice, was
published by Karnac Books in 2016 and received enthusiastic
reviews from the British Journal of Psychiatry Bulletin and the
British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.


Andrew talks in this interview about the importance of music to
him, how aesthetics can be relevant to psychiatry and
psychotherapy, and about values-based practice.


More about Andrew's work and writing can be found at
https://afwest.com/ and https://www.developmentalconversations.co.uk/ and
he tweets as @afwesty.