Nick Lea

Nick is a Nurse Consultant in CAMHS with extensive experience across children’s mental health services, custodial settings, residential care, and regional provider collaboratives. He specialises in working with complexity at the intersection of trauma, risk, relationships, and systems under sustained pressure.

A central focus of Nick’s work is the application of Non-Violent Resistance beyond individual or family therapy and into leadership, care systems, and multi-agency practice. He is particularly interested in helping everyone around the child first: strengthening the capacity of parents, carers, frontline teams, leaders, and professional networks to remain present, connected, boundaried, and able to think clearly under pressure. His approach recognises that meaningful change for a child is often dependent on the adults and systems around them becoming more coordinated, confident, and containing.

Although Nick does not deliver NVR as an inpatient therapeutic intervention, he does so working with parents and carers whose children are placed in inpatient and residential settings. In this context, he supports families to rebuild calm, boundaried presence and relational authority, particularly where prolonged separation, escalating risk processes, or professional systems have eroded parental confidence, influence, and connection.

Through senior clinical roles and programme leadership, including the development of Intensive Residential Outreach Care (IROC), Nick has used NVR-informed principles to support placement stability, workforce containment, and safer multi-agency decision-making around children with complex needs. His work seeks to restore parental and carer presence alongside the presence of professional networks, rather than positioning families as peripheral to care or locating instability solely within the child.

Nick is a licensed NVR Trainer with PartnershipProjects and delivers NVR training within his organisation to health and social care colleagues. He presented on NVR and leadership at the 2024 NVR Association Conference. His training style is reflective, practice-grounded, and rooted in the realities of working with children, families, teams, and systems experiencing significant complexity.