Dr Anthony Akenzua

Dr Anthony Akenzua

Dr Anthony Akenzua is the trust’s Clinical Director of Adult Acute Mental Health Services – a new role embracing the intake and short term interventions teams across Greenwich, Bexley and Bromley.

The 41-year-old Nigerian first joined the trust nine years ago in 2002 – and an awful lot has happened during that period.

First and foremost was the tragic death of his wife from cancer in 2009. Anthony said: “We first came to the UK because my wife got a scholarship to do a PhD in pharmaceutical chemistry, but she passed away in 2009 at the age of 34.

“The trust and many of its staff were very supportive of me especially when I lost my wife that’s something I’ll never forget.”

When Anthony first relocated from Nigeria he did additional training at three London hospitals – which continued what has basically been a lifetime, including childhood, with medicine bubbling away in the background.

Anthony again: “As a younger man I came from a background where my dad was a medical doctor in Nigeria. Naturally I was influenced by my father’s circle of colleagues and friends and inevitably I signed up to go to medical school – but without any real direction as to what branch of medicine I’d like to end up working in.

“Later I was inspired by one of my lecturers – a professor of psychiatry at the University of Benin, in the Delta region of mid-west Nigeria and decided to pursue a career in that branch of medicine.

“As Clinical Director my responsibility will be for inpatients across the trust – a very wide remit. I want to bridge the gap between the quality of care we provide for our service users and the expectation of care they have of us. There is always room for improvement.

“People’s expectations have changed over the years and it is necessary to keep on improving. We can always try to do things differently, to make sure service users enjoy their encounter with Oxleas as much as is possible. This is a challenge I look forward to being involved in.

“Just before I started working in mental health services we lived in a society that still treated the mentally ill in big hostel like establishments. Nowadays care is delivered safely and comprehensively in the community. People can receive treatment while staying with the people they love.

“We try to get people back into the community less impaired, frequently using the skills of our home treatment teams.”

“Working at Oxleas has been a joy for me over the nine years I’ve been here. I look forward to working with colleagues not just in Greenwich but across the whole trust and I want to give something back for the kindness I have been shown here.”