Helen Kelly qualified as an adult nurse in 1996 at the University of Birmingham, where she trained at the Queen Elizabeth School of Nursing.
Early in her career, Helen worked at a range of local hospitals across Birmingham in different clinical areas, including thoracic HDU at Birmingham Heartlands Hospital and gynaecology at Birmingham Women’s Hospital.
Following the completion of a degree in Health Promotion, Helen went on to qualify as a health visitor, working across Chelmsley Wood and Damson Wood, and later achieved a MSc in Advanced Practice in 2005.
Helen went on to work at Solihull Care Trust, where she later became the Maternity and Children’s Commissioning Lead, delivering the commissioning portfolio of all health services for children and young people within Solihull.
In 2013, Helen worked at NHSE England covering Birmingham Solihull and the Black Country as the Head of Public Health. In this role, she led the design and development of the NHS England commissioning arrangements for agreed NHS public health services in the Area Team with a commissioning budget of £85m.
Upon the establishment of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) in 2014, Helen became the Director of Solihull Together for Solihull CCG, a place-based health and social care integration programme supporting a local population of 210,000 to have the best health and wellbeing possible, by preventing ill health, delivering care closer to home and offering rapid access to specialist services.
Following the integration of three local CCGs to create Birmingham and Solihull CCG, Helen was appointed as Associate Director of Integration (urgent care/community), in which she led a team of 21 people to deliver integration across urgent care and adult community care.
After a national restructure of health and care bodies, Helen was appointed as the Director of Nursing for Quality Improvement for the NHS Birmingham and Solihull Integrated Care Board (ICB), which saw Helen lead the ICB’s Quality and Equity Improvement Team to ensure services can be delivered safely across areas of nursing and quality improvement.
In 2024, Helen was appointed as Chief Nurse at NHS Birmingham and Solihull ICB.