Heidi Hardman-Welsh
Heidi Hardman-Welsh reports on health stories for The Leader, covering communities in Flintshire and Wrexham. Her work centres on how medical issues, care, accessibility and local support shape everyday life, using detailed case studies drawn from people and projects in the area. In her coverage, serious illness, disability and community response sit side by side rather than as separate beats.
Serious illness and family impact
One of her health features follows a family whose father develops symptoms that resemble Alzheimer’s disease, only to receive an incurable brain cancer diagnosis. She stays close to the timeline of symptoms and diagnosis, showing how uncertainty, misinterpretation and eventual clarity unfold for the patient and his relatives. The story combines medical detail with the emotional consequences of a terminal prognosis, making clear how a condition understood at first as memory loss becomes something far more acute. Her approach in this kind of piece is to keep the focus on the people involved, using the clinical facts to support, rather than dominate, the narrative.
Accessibility and local health initiatives
Hardman-Welsh also covers projects that seek to make health and everyday life more accessible for people in her patch. Her work includes a feature on an Accessibility Guide for Wrexham. In that coverage she gives space to the guide itself and the efforts behind it, treating accessibility as a concrete, local issue rather than an abstract policy theme. By focusing on a single guide produced for a specific town, she shows how accessibility work is organised, communicated and celebrated at community level. This strand of her reporting links health and disability with local infrastructure, looking at how information and physical spaces can reduce barriers for people with additional needs.
Fundraising, veterans and community voices
Beyond formal initiatives, she reports on individual and grassroots efforts that intersect with health, such as fundraising campaigns led by local figures. These pieces spotlight organisers and beneficiaries, giving readers a clear view of how money is raised, why it matters and who drives the effort. She treats fundraising not just as a total amount but as a story about motivation, persistence and support networks.
Hardman-Welsh also looks for stories rooted in service and remembrance. She seeks out contributions from veterans in Wrexham and Flintshire ahead of Remembrance Day through online community groups. In doing so, she brings voices from the armed forces into her wider human-interest reporting, connecting past service with present community life. This broadens her health beat into a wider picture of resilience, care and memory, where physical and mental wellbeing sit alongside questions of identity and history.
Local focus and human-centred reporting
Across these areas, Hardman-Welsh’s through-line is a local, human-centred approach to health. She reports for The Leader with a clear geographic focus on Flintshire and Wrexham, anchoring her stories in specific streets, organisations and families rather than national statistics. Her coverage of serious illness, accessibility guides, fundraising drives and veterans’ experiences all turns on how people live with, respond to and organise around health-related challenges. The result is work that treats health as part of everyday community life, with medical detail present but always grounded in the realities of the individuals involved.
4 more health journalists.
Alex Storey
Alex Storey is a journalist at LBC whose work is driven by specific cases that test professional conduct and accountability in health and the public sector. He covers health as his main beat, focusing on the point where individual decisions by clinicians or officials meet public trust in institutions. His reporting is incident-first and case-led, using concrete episodes to show how rules, ethics and policy work in real life. Recent pieces include a disciplinary case where a nurse was struck off after linking a patient’s cancer to Covid jabs, and coverage of civil servants being “paid to play Grand Theft Auto” as “lived experience” training. Across these stories, he examines how professionals, regulators and officials explain their decisions, and what that reveals about trust, responsibility and the standards expected of people in positions of authority.
Alexandra Thompson
Alexandra Thompson is an assistant news editor focused on health who treats health claims as hypotheses to be tested rather than messages to be repeated. She works at New Scientist, combining editing with frontline reporting on ageing brains, cognitive health, chronic illness, contested treatments and infectious disease. Her beat centres on how neuroscience and psychology intersect with everyday health choices and on how scientific findings translate into real-world outcomes for people living with illness. She examines lifestyle advice, rehabilitation programmes and outbreak guidance against current evidence, clarifying risk without overstating it and giving space to controversy without sensationalising it. Alongside written news she appears in audio and video formats, bringing the same clear, news-driven approach to live discussions and helping shape the daily health agenda while keeping a tight focus on evidence and impact.
Alice Wilkinson
Alice Wilkinson investigates how everyday habits, products and routines shape sleep and long-term wellbeing, using test-driven health features to separate hype from real benefit. She holds a senior role on The Telegraph’s health features team, writing and shaping consumer-focused coverage that blends personal trial with clear expert evidence. Her core beat is sleep as a practical, solvable part of daily life, from detailed comparisons of magnesium supplements to service pieces on how sleeping position affects health over time. She treats supplements as a crowded, over-claimed market that demands careful testing and clear-eyed reporting. Alongside long-form features she writes weekly health desk dispatches on sleep, stress and concentration. Across her work she combines substantial self-testing, specialist insight and plain, unfussy prose to give readers measurable, realistic changes they can make.
Ally Head
Ally Head connects performance-focused fitness reporting with women’s health, sustainability and relationships, using her own endurance training and health history to stress-test trends against expert guidance. She is Senior Health, Sustainability and Relationships Editor at Marie Claire UK, where she shapes the health agenda across training, wellbeing and conscious living and writes and commissions news, topical features and SEO-led long-form pieces. A ten-time marathoner and Boston-qualifying runner, she focuses on structured, realistic training plans, strength and conditioning for women who run, and performance longevity. Her women’s health work centres on hormones, chronic conditions and fact versus fiction wellness claims. She also covers sustainability as conscious living and relationships, mental resilience and lifestyle features, favouring plain language, lived experience, specialist commentary and clear, repeatable routines. She has previously produced similar content for Women’s Health, Stylist, Glamour and Grazia.