Victoria Richards
Victoria Richards writes first-person health and life stories that blur the line between confession, reported feature and advice column, using intimate case studies to explore illness, care and emotional strain rather than policy or clinical research. She works on the Voices desk at The Independent, where she writes opinion-led pieces, edits coverage for Independent Women and answers readers’ letters as the masthead’s agony aunt under the Dear Vix banner.
Health told through personal crisis and family strain
Richards uses health stories to examine fear, identity and relationships rather than to track medical breakthroughs or system reform. In her piece about a person newly diagnosed with dementia, she centres the subject’s terror and uncertainty, focusing on how the diagnosis destabilises their sense of self and their ties to loved ones, not on clinical detail or service design. Other recent work uses first-person or close-up narrative to explore affairs, addiction in the family and the moral and emotional fallout around those situations, often touching on mental health, secrecy and guilt alongside physical wellbeing. Across these pieces she returns to themes of diagnosis shock, caregiving burdens and the way illness and crisis redistribute responsibility within families, with the headline framing often written as a direct admission or confession.
Opinion-led coverage from the Voices desk
At The Independent, Richards holds a senior role on the opinion side and contributes regular columns under the Voices label. Her pieces are written in the first person, with strong, declarative headlines such as “I’m a mum of two – but I can’t support this social media ban”, using personal experience to frame broader debates on parenting, online safety and public policy. She also edits and fronts the Independent Women newsletter, where she tackles issues such as heatwaves and the rising cost of living through a gendered lens, highlighting how events and economic conditions translate into unequal emotional and practical loads for women. The through-line is advocacy built from lived experience: she places herself or her subject inside the story to anchor arguments about health, work and family in everyday detail.
Dear Vix: health, work and relationships as advice problems
Richards’ Dear Vix column extends her focus on health into the realm of dilemmas, where medical, psychological and digital harms show up as personal questions rather than abstract trends. She answers letters on subjects such as anxiety around dating, social withdrawal, online trolling and harassment, often addressing how these stresses affect sleep, confidence and mental health. Her advice blends practical steps (for example, moderating or blocking online abuse, taking time away from apps and using tools to enforce digital breaks) with emotional validation and reassurance about fear, shame and self-worth. The tone is direct and conversational, but she grounds her guidance in her own experience as a writer facing online hostility and as an editor working closely with women’s stories of risk, overwork and burnout.
Independent Women and gendered burdens of care
Through the Independent Women newsletter and related features, Richards treats health as inseparable from gender, work and money. She highlights how heatwaves, childcare gaps and the cost of living combine to place disproportionate strain on women, especially mothers, foregrounding hidden labour, fatigue and stress rather than only formal employment statistics. Her framing emphasises the everyday logistics of care — school closures, workplace expectations, domestic chores — and how these interact with physical exhaustion and mental overload, building a picture of health that is social and structural as much as individual. In this coverage she often connects personal anecdotes to broader patterns, using the newsletter format to move between reader-facing commentary and curated links or features focused on women’s lives.
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.