Rekha is a senior Public Health and palliative care nurse with considerable experience of clinical, quality, governance, safeguarding and research leadership across community-based organisations and the NHS in the UK and abroad.

She is a practiced health visitor, nurse prescriber and a palliative care researcher, interested in lived experience ethnographies of resource-poverty and minoritisation. She led the 0-19 service during the Grenfell Fire tragedy (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jun/27/grenfell-survivors-help-now-health-visitors-trauma-rekha-vijayshankar), has been clinical lead for a large nursing facility and is currently responsible for quality and governance for the London place-base of a national end of life charity.

Rekha was brought into nursing from caring for her seriously ill husband, as a young mother. Her work, writing and research has focussed on contemplations on the purpose of death and the impact of the human existential disconnections, with a view to learning how lived experience can be made more beautiful and enriched today. In her speaking, Rekha encourages honest self-reflection and an openness to pluriversality, inclusion and empowerment in a spirit of convivial scholarship.

She undertook UK’s first ever hospice led engagement with minority ethnic communities in an area of high deprivation to understand their experience of palliative care towards the end of life. Her systematic review on the bereavement experience and support needs of minority ethnic parents whose child has died, is the first qualitative evidence synthesis in this under-researched area.

Rekha is currently working on a project to build community capacity in the awareness of palliative care symptoms, systems and grief support, so peer support networks can be built within communities for individuals and families with serious and life limiting illnesses.

Rekha is a visiting fellow with the Open University Open Thanatology Group, an honorary nurse consultant with a renowned spinal injury charity in India and an associate trustee of a CQC rated ‘Outstanding’ hospice in the UK. Rekha was awarded the prestigious Churchill Fellowship in Palliative Care, and is a Queen’s Nurse. She also holds the Associateship of King’s College, London. She lives with her growing children, an elderly dog, and a zen cat and loves to walk, write poetry (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/christmas/2024/01/25/the-nurse-who-helps-dying-patients-write-poetry/ ) and cook.