Dr Kate Lovett
Presidential Lead for Recruitment
Dr Kate Lovett is the Presidential Lead for Recruitment at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and immediate past Dean.
She studied Medicine at the Universities of St. Andrews and Manchester. Having been awarded a Distinction in Psychiatry at finals, Kate trained as a Psychiatrist in the Northwest obtaining the MRCPsych in 1995.
She completed an MSc in Clinical Psychiatry in 1997 researching the role of ovarian steroids in postnatal depression. Kate trained both full time and flexibly completing specialist training in 2001. She worked for Devon Partnership Trust as a Consultant General Adult Psychiatrist from 2001 to 2019 where she had several roles as a sector psychiatrist, inpatient and crisis consultant, community psychiatrist and Associate Medical Director. Since 2019 she has provided consultant leadership to a Community Mental Health Team in Livewell Southwest, a social enterprise which delivers NHS care to a deprived community in Plymouth.
Kate has a longstanding interest in training and education. She has been undergraduate Psychiatry lead for Peninsula Medical School and Training Programme Director for Adult Psychiatry. She completed a Postgraduate Certificate of Clinical Education with Distinction in 2008. She served on the Education, Training and Standards Committee at the Royal College of Psychiatrists between 2010 and 2014 and on the South West Division between 2010 and 2016. Kate was appointed as CASC (Clinical Assessment of Skills and Competencies) examiner in 2008 and became a lead examiner in 2014.
She was Head of School of Psychiatry for the Peninsula Deanery for four and a half years until 2016 when she gave up this role having been elected Dean of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
In her role as Dean, Kate led work on recruitment and retention in the mental health workforce and has been a driving force behind the #ChoosePsychiatry campaign which has led to 100% recruitment to core training. She has successfully overseen the digitisation of the RCPsych membership examinations, one of the most ambitious projects the college has ever undertaken. She also led the modernisation of all psychiatric postgraduate curricula during her tenure and led groundbreaking work on supporting people with lived experience to lead and deliver training.
Since 2019 she has chaired the project board for the National Confidential Enquiry into Suicide.
As Presidential Lead for Recruitment she is working with members across the College to develop an ambitious and comprehensive five-year strategy for recruitment.
Kate's drive to develop systems that support compassionate care and recovery for patients, fuels all her leadership activities and is underpinned by values of equity and fairness.