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My work explores how people navigate living with long-term health conditions, and how psychological knowledge and skills are developed and applied in professional practice.
I joined University of Gloucestershire in 2021 as a Senior Lecturer in Applied Clinical and Health Psychology. I am a psychologist, researcher, educator, and coach with a background spanning research and clinical education.
My work explores the psychological experience of living with long-term health conditions, with a particular focus on how people adapt, make sense of, and live with health-related challenges.
Alongside this, I am interested in how psychological practitioners develop, sustain, and apply clinical competence in evidence-based practice, including how professional skills are taught, assessed, and refined over time.
I teach across clinical and health psychology at undergraduate level and on the MSc Health Psychology programme. I have a particular interest in how we design and evaluate teaching in applied psychology contexts, including the development of clinical skills assessment methods and the use of blended and technology-enhanced learning to support active, experiential engagement.
My pedagogical work focuses on how we can best train psychological practitioners, particularly in relation to developing competence, reflective practice, and evidence-based clinical skills.
Lived Experience of Long-Term and Stigmatised Health Conditions
My research explores how people understand, make sense of, and adapt to living with long-term health conditions. I use participatory and lived-experience approaches to centre the voices of those most affected, with a particular focus on the psychosocial dimensions of chronic illness — including stigma and fatigue. This work has included collaboration with health charities to improve understanding and support for individuals living with Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis.
Alongside this, my broader work in adult mental health has examined health anxiety, recurrent depression, and suicide postvention, and includes an interest in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) as an intervention to support mental health and wellbeing.
Professional Skills Development
This strand of my work focuses on how psychological practitioners develop and sustain clinical competence. This includes the design and evaluation of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) training programmes, the role of supervision and coaching in professional development, and approaches to assessing psychological skills in practice.
I developed the Assessment of CBT Competencies Scale (ACCS), an internationally used tool for evaluating competence in CBT, now translated into five languages.
Methodological Expertise
My recent research has a primarily qualitative focus, with an emphasis on lived-experience methodologies, including thematic analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), and meta-synthesis. I also use creative and participatory approaches, such as photovoice, to explore experience through participant-generated visual and narrative methods. My work additionally draws on a range of methodologies, and has included systematic reviews, psychometric evaluation, randomised controlled trials, and intervention and training evaluation.
Key Research Themes:
Alongside my academic and research work, I deliver psychological coaching for individuals navigating wellbeing, professional development, career direction, and personal change. My approach is calm, reflective, and collaborative, grounded in psychological theory and evidence-informed practice, with a strong focus on strengths-based and behaviour change principles.
Publications from Kate Muse can be found in the Research Repository.