Kate Diggory

Biography

Kate is a BACP accredited humanistic/integrative counsellor, supervisor and coach. She has worked for several years in the Hospice movement as a counsellor working with adult patients, carers, friends and relatives and bereaved family members. She has previously run a community wide bereavement service for children, young people and their families as well as worked in private practice.

Kate is interested in mindfulness and self-compassion, professional and informal carer self-care, life-limiting illness, palliative care, bereavement and loss and spirituality. Kate was awarded her PhD from the University of Chester. Her research explored the experiences of informal carers of those with a life limiting or terminal diagnosis of a brief self-compassion intervention. She is predominantly a qualitative researcher with interests in qualitative focused mixed methods, reflexive thematic analysis, phenomenological approaches and using media and virtual data collection methods.

Research and scholarship

• May 2018 Poster presentation “Experiences of a brief self-compassion programme for carers of those with a life limiting or palliative diagnosis. A pilot study” BACP Annual Research Conference, London 2018
• March 2019 “Self-Compassion as Self-Care: Caring for the Carer” 13th Annual Keele Counselling Conference
• May 2019 “Self-Compassion for carers. Experiences of a short programme for carers of those with a life limiting or palliative diagnosis” BACP Annual Research Conference, Belfast 2019
• April 2021 “Teetering on the edge. Despair and hope in caring for someone with a life-limiting or terminal diagnosis. The role of self-compassion and self-care” 15th Annual Keele Counselling Conference
• May 2021 “I too matter. The role of counsellors, psychotherapists and healthcare practitioners in encouraging self-compassion and self-care in unpaid carers” BACP Annual Research Conference, online May 2021
• May 2023  Symposium presenter Duoethnography: Reflexive engagement with global issues presented to counselling and psychotherapy BACP Annual Research Conference, Leeds, May 2023

Teaching

• PSY-40026 Research Methods
• PSY-40027 Dissertation
• PSY- 40054 Personal and Professional Development and Reflexivity

Publications

Lefroy, J., Bialan, J., Moult, A., Hay, F., Stapleton, C., Thompson, J., Diggory, K., Mustafa, N., Farrington, J., Aynsley, S.A., Jacklin, S., Winterton, A. & Cope, N.(2023). Training healthcare professionals to be ready for practice in an era of social distancing: A realist evaluation. (Preprint)

Diggory, K., & Reeves, A. (2021). ‘Permission to be kind to myself’. The experiences of informal carers of those with a life-limiting or terminal illness of a brief self-compassion-based self-care intervention. Progress in Palliative Care, 1-9. doi:10.1080/09699260.2021.1972722