From Health Care Assistant to Honorary Professor: The Remarkable Journey of Jacqui Cooper
Last week, the University of Salford’s School of Health and Society awarded Jacqui Cooper the title Honorary Professor in Knowledge Transfer in Digital Transformation – a recognition that honours not just her achievements in digital nursing leadership, but the extraordinary personal story behind them.
It is easy, looking at Jacqui’s national influence today, to imagine a straight path to success, but her journey began far from boardrooms and keynote stages. Jacqui was a young parent who started her caring career as a health care assistant, never expecting or planning to become one of the UK’s most respected clinical and digital health leaders.
What changed everything was nursing.
A Nurse at Her Core
“I believe I was born to be a nurse” Jacqui says. Nursing wasn’t just a profession, it was a calling that shaped her identity, built her confidence, and introduced her to the people who would help her realise what she was capable of.
But the path wasn’t always smooth. Nursing can be hierarchical and often unforgiving. Yet even amidst challenges, small acts of kindness carried enormous impact. A supportive neonatal nurse. A transport team colleague who offered encouragement at the right moment. A director of nursing who saw her potential. A Chief Information Officer and Chief Medical Information Officer who opened her world to the potential of digital transformation. Many of those people will never know how profoundly they influenced her, but Jacqui remembers every one.
She repaid their kindness by becoming the kind of leader she had always wanted. Even as a junior nurse, she enjoyed teaching students, providing them with learning tools to offer the best placement experience. As a unit manager arranging rosters around people’s lives, not just shifts, whilst ensuring the unit was staffed safely with the correct level of expertise, she always maintained the understanding that staff are people with lives. Her passion has always been to facilitate learning, exposure to communities of practice and succession planning.
A Career Shaped by Curiosity, Courage, and Possibility
Jacqui’s career spans almost three decades of clinical excellence and digital transformation across Wirral University Teaching Hospital, Liverpool University Hospitals, Manchester Foundation Trust, Health Innovation Manchester, and NHS Greater Manchester. Her roles have included:
- Staff nurse, ward manager and corporate matron
- Manager of a 24 cot, level 3 neonatal intensive care unit
- Chief Nursing Informatics Officer across four major North West organisations
- Vice Chair of the National Digital Health Integrated Care System Group
Her digital achievements are extensive and pioneering:
- Leading Europe’s largest EPIC Electronic Patient Record system implementation for 10,000 nurses, midwives and Allied Health Professionals
- Designing first‑of‑type digital solutions for neonatal and intensive care
- Developing gamification based digital onboarding – the first in the NHS
- Contributing to a five-year digital strategy for one of the UK’s largest hospital trusts
- Driving national work in maternity digital maturity, clinical safety, and the patient safety collaborative
- Authoring influential, thought-provoking leadership articles, including “Integration of AI into nursing practice necessitates multifaceted governance” (Nursing Times, 2025)
But throughout all of it, she has kept nurses at the centre. She fights for their voices to be heard in digital design, because she remembers what it felt like to not be heard.
Championing the Future Workforce
What drives Jacqui most is her belief that digital capability must be woven into a clinician’s journey from the very beginning. Working closely with universities, including Salford, she helps ensure that digital skills sit at the heart of the curriculum, that students build confidence in data, documentation and digital safety, and that training incorporates simulation and gamification to make learning more engaging. She is also committed to ensuring digital innovation reaches every corner of the health and care system.
Remembering the Journey
For all her accomplishments, Jacqui remains deeply humble.
“I may be the one receiving this honorary professorship, but what you can’t see is the journey that brought me here. I’m the product of incredible teams, supportive colleagues, and people who believed in me. I am a nurse who never expected any of this, so the imposter syndrome is real and I feel genuinely humbled. I’ll be using this platform to push digital transformation forward and explore what’s possible for Greater Manchester and beyond.”
Her four children have grown up watching their mum lead major digital programmes, speak at national conferences, and influence national strategy. But they’ve also watched her stay grounded, never losing sight of where she started or who helped her along the way.
Why This Professorship Matters
Jacqui’s new role is more than a personal honour, it represents the value of lived experience in academic leadership and the vital role clinicians, particularly nurses, play in shaping the digital future of healthcare. It highlights how kindness, mentorship and teamwork underpin professional growth, and how important it is to connect frontline practice with academic innovation.
In this professorship, Jacqui will continue championing inclusive digital transformation, strengthening workforce readiness for AI and emerging technologies, collaborating across sectors, and advancing the mission to improve digital literacy and health equity across Greater Manchester.
From a young woman who always wanted to be a nurse, to an Honorary Professor shaping the digital future of UK healthcare, Jacqui Cooper embodies what is possible when talent meets tenacity and others choose to lift you up. Her professorship is a celebration of every person who helped her on the way and every future nurse whose potential she is helping to unlock.
