Tara Casey

I qualified as an adult nurse in 1996. I trained at Nottingham University and started my career on an Infectious Diseases Unit which developed my interest in the care of people effected and affected by HIV/AIDS.

This led me to work in palliative care at the Royal Marsden and an inpatient HIV unit at St Bartholomews hospital in London.

In 1999 I qualified as a Specialist Community Public Health nurse and worked as a Sure Start health visitor before becoming an HIV Specialist Health Visitor in South West London. With the introduction of routine antenatal HIV screening this role changed and I became a Community Clinical Nurse Specialist for HIV for many years.

The role was to provide a seamless pathway of high quality care from the community to the acute setting. This role introduced me to many aspects of Public Health and led me to undertake a Diploma in Tropical Nursing and MSc in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. This was an amazing opportunity to explore public health on a local, national and international level.

I am a contraceptive and sexual health nurse (CASH) practitioner and have been involved in many health promotion projects over the years including school sexual health programmes, sex worker outreach, parenting programmes , breastfeeding cafes and I am an instructor for the Mental Health First Aid toolkit (England).

I am interested in all areas of research relating to public health. 

Areas of special interest include:

Sexual health & HIV:

Sexual health promotion for young people :

• delivered by digital media
• consent/sexual debut in young people
• mental health/risk taking

Health promotion / health education programmes 

Public policy & health inequality

Mental health & breast feeding