Director of Nursing retires after nearly 40 years

Retiring Director of Nursing, Anita Lewin.

A Director of Nursing at Lincolnshire’s NHS service for mental health care is retiring after a nearly 40-year career in the county.

Anita Lewin, Director of Nursing for Allied Health Professionals and Quality, has retired after dedicating her career to mental health services in Lincolnshire.

Anita started as a ‘dinner lady’ at Rauceby Hospital, moving on to doing her nurse training. From humble beginnings in the canteen, Anita now holds the post as Director of Nursing, where she oversees the support and development of nursing, allied health professionals, social workers, and psychology across the broad range of mental health, learning disability and autism services Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (LPFT) provides.

She has worked at Boston hospital and Stamford resource centre, the Grantham assertive outreach team and in a trust-wide clinical nurse specialist role.

Colleagues describe Anita as a genuinely caring person and someone who always demonstrates commitment to patient care.

She has been the force behind a number of new services and was responsible for starting to reduce the number of people needing hospital care or going out of the area for hospital care.

Anita has worked closely with Lincolnshire Police to reduce the numbers of mental health patients taken to custody as a place of safety and feels passionately that mental health should not be “criminalised”. She introduced initiatives such as Lincolnshire’s triage car, health-based place of safety, psychiatric decisions unit and a mental health nurse in the Police Control Room. This initiative gained widespread backing, supporting police officers and other health colleagues such as paramedics and A&E staff to help protect and care for our most vulnerable people at times of crisis.

Anita said: “There is something very special about LPFT and I’ve been so proud and privileged to have been a nurse and part of supporting so many patients and their families.”

Her role will now be held by Sharon Harvey, who has also worked large parts of her career in Lincolnshire, as well as senior nursing roles in the NHS England team.