Tina Everett – Mental Health Physiotherapist
Interviewed by Jonathan Leach
Biography
Tina developed her career in physiotherapy by becoming qualified to work in mental health settings. In 1992 Tina became Head Mental Health Physiotherapist for services at the Warneford and Littlemore Hospitals in Oxford. The Warneford had an old-fashioned feel to it when she joined, but she enjoyed the multidisciplinary approach employed within the hospital. Tina explains that physiotherapy can help people with their mental health problems as well as addressing issues with their physical wellbeing. She describes some the innovations that were introduced during her time at these two hospitals with particular reference to the Warneford. These innovations included developing a gym for patients and running outdoor Tai Chi/Qi Gong sessions which proved very successful.
Transcript of audio excerpt
Tina Everett – Mental Health Physiotherapist – interviewed by Jonathan Leach 18.11.2025
Tina Everett
I’m Tina Everrett and I’m a Chartered Physiotherapist and I started working in mental health in 1989… when I started, I just had an experience of teaching relaxation and exercise, but I immediately enrolled on a course for physiotherapists in mental health, which had only been developed in 1980. In 1970 there were only 10 physiotherapists working in mental health in the UK, so there were a lot of hospitals and there may still be hospitals without any mental health physiotherapy provision, I mean mental health hospitals. But most of the larger mental health trusts do employ physiotherapists now.
… I was impressed that I was asked a question about physiotherapists needing to touch people and generally in psychiatry and psychotherapy you avoid touch and how I could well cope with that barrier really and was that a good thing or a bad thing? So I was impressed that that was a question that they’d actually considered. I also liked the fact that I was going to be part of a multidisciplinary team and that was very important and I think that’s something I gained a lot from working at the Warneford was working with nurses, with psychologists, particularly with OTs. And that was good, yeah.
I think it felt fairly old-fashioned, yes, at the Warneford. Yeah, there were two adult wards and then the ward for older people, Allen Ward, which seemed a very traditional sort of ward then. Yeah. That was before the Fulbrook Centre was built. We had a very small office just near Vaughan Thomas Ward for physiotherapy. I was head physio. I had one senior physiotherapist working with me and a physio assistant and that was all when I first started.
…there’s a lot of research to show that exercise helps mood and it helps mild to moderate depression. It’s also been shown to help in addictive behaviours and that exercise can become a healthy addiction as opposed to the less healthy ones. The other thing is… now let me think… there’s relaxation techniques which we also find the OTs do as well, and stress management. And the other thing is that when people have got enduring mental illness, they will find it very difficult to engage in a hospital physiotherapy department, a general physiotherapy department to go as an outpatient. They won’t get there on time. They might be very fearful about it. They might be too afraid to go there on their own. So to have physiotherapy within the hospital or within the, or come as an outpatient to a familiar surroundings such as the Warneford was very important. and also having less rigid attitudes towards the actual treatment. So not doing such a long assessment the first time, doing an ongoing assessment for people with maybe just a small amount of assessment at the first visit. So trying to make the whole process of the treatment less threatening…
… So we tried to get all the staff when they assessed a new patient to ask them whether they would like to be involved with any physiotherapy. But then if anyone had back pain or any physical problems they would be referred. I found to start with that a lot of the nurses would think if someone was getting headaches or back pain, their tendency was to think that was psychological and to get across to them that it might be worth them seeing a physio because quite often it could be a merely physical problem that could be sorted out by a physio.
But then as far as the work’s concerned we had already I think we already had a gym established in the Cotswold House at the Warneford with some weights and things and so a big part of my job was really managing that room, making sure that… I’m trying to remember whether that was actually established before I started or whether I got that going, because I remember getting some second-hand weightlifting equipment off the rowing club in Oxford. So anyway we set up this gym and we set up a program where patients could come three times a week for the morning session or the afternoon session and we always had a physio there and quite often an assistant. If it was only one or two patients, the assistant might be left there by herself with adequate training. So patients came there just to enjoy a routine of regular exercise. And then we would take referrals from any of the staff at the Warneford who felt somebody would need physiotherapy. And that might be a referral for them to come to the gym to do regular exercise.
People would say how much they found the gym helpful and it did lift their mood. And we did, throughout the time there, we did various sort of questionnaires asking people if they found it helpful and what else they would like to do in the way of exercise and as we developed and got more staff we took people out into the community to the leisure centre.
Yeah, so then as we developed, I got a physiotherapist for the addictions unit who worked very closely with the addictions OT. and they set up that service. I got another physiotherapist, senior physiotherapist, to work with older people. So she specialised in that area, especially as they moved to Fulbrook and then we got more assistants. After about a year the physio assistant left and we had a new younger assistant who had a sports science degree and she was excellent in the gym. She was very observant and very able to lead the gym work on her own. So that was really good. We started taking students, physio students on placements. And we then went on to set up a training course for physios and physio assistants new to working in mental health. And that was a national course, which we ran at Warneford and Littlemore.
We did Tai Chi. We had a Tai Chi guy who came in once a week to lead a class and then I learnt sort of with him. It wasn’t the whole movement of Tai Chi, it was Qi Gong. It was the Tai Chi type exercises. We called it Tai Chi because that made more sense to people than Qi Gong. That was that was very successful actually people loved that very sort of slow movement with a lot of emphasis on balance and we did that outside in the grounds of the Warneford over by the cricket pitch, so that was really good. And we also did take, as I say we had an assistant who used to take people to the leisure centre on a regular basis, and that was very popular to use the gym there and any other activities that they were interested in. And we did sometimes take people for walks as well, yeah.
So we had about, I think we had 11 or 12 staff altogether, when I left; probably five physiotherapists and the rest assistants and we trained the assistants up. And they did… some of them did massage, some did, mostly did sort of exercise therapy of one thought or another.
Well, the psychologists and the OTs and the nurses were great. The psychiatrists, well, they might listen to what you said, but then they were so interested in their medication, I felt they didn’t really take physiotherapy seriously very often. Like they might walk into.. open the door and walk into your relaxation class and say, ‘Could I have Mrs. So-and-so come to clinic?’ and that upset the whole sort of atmosphere of the class.
Jonathan Leach
So do you feel they could have done more to refer people to physiotherapy?
Tina Everett
Yes, yeah. I mean there were some who were very good and some who weren’t, and some who were just stuck on the medication being the be-all and end-all of treatment, and I think the OTs felt the same. Yeah.
Well, I think the grounds were a great asset. Yeah. I think… I don’t know about elsewhere but I did find that the staff were very supportive. If there was a traumatic situation that they looked to support each other and we felt supported in that too, which was very important, especially after some incident, that there was always a time for feedback, not taking it home with you.
Jonathan Leach
What do you think you’ve learnt and gained from the work you’ve done at the Warneford and Littlemore? If anything?
Tina Everett
Oh, I’m sure I have, yeah. I mean, I suppose an understanding of how painful it is to have a mental illness and some of society’s attitudes towards mental illness. Well I mean obviously since I left, mental health has become much more to the fore and people are better able to talk about it now than perhaps when I was working there.
