The Pulmonary Rehabilitation Services Accreditation Scheme (PRSAS) are pleased to announce the appointment of Maria Buxton to the position of PRSAS Clinical Lead designate. In the coming month, Maria will succeed Sally Singh as clinical lead for PRSAS. 

Maria is the clinical lead and service manager for the West Herts Community Respiratory Service at Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust in Hertfordshire, which is a large integrated community respiratory service, providing nine respiratory services, including pulmonary rehabilitation (PR). She qualified as a physiotherapist at Kings College Hospital and then progressed through working mostly in London, but also USA and Australia. She progressed to the role of clinical specialist and has been involved in PR since 1997 and became an integrated consultant physiotherapist in 2005. Most recently she has been the quality lead for the PRSAS accreditation programme since 2021, leading on assessor training, providing support to services on how to achieve accreditation, and have vast experience in accreditation assessments. We look forward to working with Maria on the continued development of PRSAS and the opportunities it represents to the UK PR community.

Maria Buxton: 'I am excited to take on the challenge of the Clinical Lead for PRSAS. Having spent the last few years as Quality Lead, I feel I have gained insight into the challenges that services face, and wish to continue to make accreditation achievable and demonstrate it can be a positive force in producing real change for services, staff and patients. We are looking forward to seeing more services submit and being accredited next year, and hope to develop talks further with services in Wales, Scotland and NI. I am looking forward to representing PRSAS at NHS and stakeholder forums and discussing the importance of Pulmonary Rehabilitation, the challenges we all face in delivering high quality care at scale across the UK, and how accreditation can be used as the vehicle to demonstrate this.'