Samantha Leathers
Samantha Leathers covers health-driven lifestyle stories for the Daily Star, with a focus on practical, everyday guidance people can act on quickly. She builds features around doctors’ and specialists’ advice, often pegged to familiar family moments or worrying symptoms, and frames medical information in plain, service-focused language.
Health advice framed through family milestones and everyday worries
Leathers often anchors her health coverage in family life and common milestones, such as Father’s Day, to surface preventive advice in a way that feels timely and personal. In her piece on a cancer doctor’s four Father’s Day questions that could save a dad’s life, she turns an annual celebration into a prompt for relatives to check in on symptoms and risk factors, translating clinical guidance into clear, direct questions relatives can ask at home. She uses this structure repeatedly: a familiar date or scenario becomes the hook, and expert commentary supplies the substance.
Her headlines and angles tend to start from a reader fear or concern—serious illness, missed warning signs, or unhealthy everyday habits—then move quickly to what action someone should take. This keeps a consistent tone across her work: she is not writing abstract health policy or deep-dive science; she is writing for people who want to know what to do about a specific risk right now. The emphasis is on early detection and minor behaviour changes that can avert more serious problems.
Translating expert guidance into everyday habits
Leathers structures many stories around advice from named clinicians or health experts, then breaks their guidance down into simple routines or rules of thumb. When a specialist outlines questions to ask a parent or partner, she presents them as a numbered set of checks that a reader can copy straight into a conversation. When a doctor highlights lifestyle risks, she pulls out the most actionable details—what to watch for, what to avoid, and how often to act.
Her style favours short, declarative sentences and concrete examples over technical detail. Medical authority comes from the experts she quotes, but the framing and language stay rooted in daily life: family meals, celebrations, nagging symptoms, and small adjustments to how people eat, move, or seek help. This makes her stories accessible for non-specialists while still anchored in professional advice.
Service-led health and lifestyle coverage for a mass audience
Working on the health beat at the Daily Star, Leathers writes for a broad, general readership rather than a niche medical or trade audience. Her pieces are designed to be quickly understood, easily shared within families, and immediately usable as a prompt to book an appointment, start a conversation with a loved one, or rethink a daily habit. The reporting format is typically short-form digital features built around a single expert interview or a tight cluster of related tips.
Across her recent work, she returns to three consistent themes: spotting serious illness earlier, nudging readers toward healthier routines, and turning expert knowledge into something that fits the texture of ordinary days. That mix of clear service, emotional hooks, and clinician-backed advice distinguishes her from more generic health news coverage that focuses on studies or policy rather than lived experience.
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.