Our Board

Dr Mary Docherty is a Consultant General Adult and Liaison Psychiatrist. She is Acting Chief Medical Officer at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.

After studying undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Politics Philosophy and Economics she trained in Medicine and undertook her psychiatry training in South London on the Maudsley Training programme. She completed National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) academic fellowships at the Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience, London. As a previous Harkness Fellow she then spent time in the USA studying integrated care systems and large-scale quality improvement approaches with Columbia University and New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York City. 

Dr Docherty’s interests focus around the use multidisciplinary thinking and collaboration to address system level problems and reduce health inequalities. She is qualified in organizational consultancy and has worked in the Department of Health, NHS England, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), Healthy London Partnership and with London’s Strategic Clinical Network on a range of national and regional programs tackling inefficiencies and inequalities at service interfaces.

She served for five years as an expert clinical advisor to NHS England’s National Mental Health Clinical Policy and Strategy group, four years as Clinical Co-ordinator with the National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcomes and Death and directs UK wide quality improvement initiatives in her role as Clinical and Strategic Director of RCPsych Centre for College Improvement.