The service turnaround Jane Fentaman is proudest of happened inside an under-resourced mental health clinic. Nothing moved there until the people delivering the care were trained in it.
Jane Fentaman has stood on the staff side of a service counter since 2001, from a gateline barrier to a mainline cab. Organisations facing a service problem tend to answer it from the other end: write a standard, circulate a policy, tell the counter to apply it. Fentaman has been on the receiving end of that sequence for twenty-five years, and the one service culture she watched change was not changed that way. “Today organisations are focused on profit margins not the customer,” she says. “That then defeats the objective.”
Jane Fentaman is a mainline train driver and was named Inspirational Frontline Woman of the Year at the 2026 Women in Rail Awards.
What Changed Inside a Mental Health Clinic When Families Were Let In
Two moves sit underneath everything Fentaman argues. The person a decision is made about belongs inside that decision, and the staff who have to carry it out have to be trained in it before the change is real. She arrived at both in a service where neither was happening.
Between 2013 and 2015 she was a social work assistant with Kent County Council, seconded to Kent and Medway Partnership Trust and posted to a community mental health clinic in Maidstone, in charge of the carers of the clinic’s patients. She had no background in mental health when she arrived. “When I joined the service I noticed how poor the communication between families and patients,” she says. The reviews of the clinic were the second thing. “I also noticed that the reviews of the Clinic were very very poor.”
The Care Act 2014 arrived while she was there. The Act gave carers a right to an assessment of their own needs for the first time, separate from the person they cared for. She was asked to champion the change, train every practitioner in how to apply it, and carry out the carers’ assessments the trust now owed. Her own reading of the gap was narrower than the statute. In a meeting with her senior she raised how little involvement parents had, particularly around the clinic’s younger patients, and the clinic took up the Triangle of Care model, which holds patient, professional and parent in the same frame.
So they piloted it. Every patient arriving at the clinic was asked in a meeting whether they consented to their parents being involved in their care. Where consent was given, Fentaman worked with the family and with the practitioners alongside them. Nothing in the model overrode the patient.
Practitioners Had to Be Trained Before the Care Act Reached a Patient
“Six months into this exercise we saw a change in patient engagement,” she says. “There was a drop in unattended appointments, parents and caregivers felt more engaged and included and that was all because we decided to focus on the needs of the patient.”
The assessments the trust owed under the Act were hers to carry out as well, alongside the practitioner training and the family work.
By eighteen months, Fentaman says, “The reviews had gone up and we started seeing five Star not only with the patients and their parents feeling included, the practitioner felt supported and confident to support their patient and they were confident in the delivery of the act because they had the right training that put patients and their families at the heart of every decision the trust made.”
The secondment ended in 2015. “I wouldn’t do anything differently,” she says. “It was challenging more especially with the lack of resources available in the healthcare sector.”
What a Frontline Manager Can Steal From a Clinic Pilot
The model Fentaman teaches under is an acronym. WAVE, the framework behind WAVE Customer Experience Academy, which she founded in July 2026, runs Welcome, Acknowledge, Value, Exceed Expectations: a positive first impression, active listening with demonstrated empathy, making the customer feel important, and leaving them with something they remember. “When customers feel welcomed, acknowledged not dismissed, valued and whatever their expectations are they are exceeded because they are made to feel valued, seen and heard,” she says. The cab and the academy get the same one-line description from her: “In both roles, I teach Service.”
The acronym is not the transferable part. The order she ran in the clinic is.
What a Frontline Manager Can Steal
- First, look at how the people inside the service are talking to each other before looking at the numbers. What started the clinic pilot was two observations from someone with no background in the field: the communication between families and patients was poor, and so were the clinic’s reviews.
- Second, name who is missing from the decision. In the clinic that was the parent, and the Triangle of Care model gave the fix its shape by holding patient, professional and parent in one frame. On a station or a service desk the absent party is usually the person the process is about.
- Third, build consent into the mechanism rather than around it. Every patient was asked directly whether they wanted their family involved, and only those who agreed were worked with that way.
- Fourth, train the people who have to deliver the change, not the people who announce it. The Care Act was law from the day it passed. It reached patients when practitioners had been taught how to apply it.
- Fifth, pilot it, and give it the time the change takes rather than the time a review cycle allows. Fentaman’s own checkpoints were six months for engagement and eighteen for reputation. Neither was available at the end of a quarter.
Who Is Jane Fentaman?
Jane Fentaman is a mainline train driver based in Leicester, England, the founder of WAVE Customer Experience Academy, and the winner of Inspirational Frontline Woman of the Year at the 2026 Women in Rail Awards.
She joined the railway in 2001 as gateline staff and moved outward from the barrier: platform staff from 2002 to 2003, station supervisor and ticket office area supervisor from 2003 to 2005, then shunter driver from 2005 to 2012, the first woman Southeastern had employed in that role.
She left the railway in 2012, pregnant and a single parent. From 2013 she worked as a social work assistant for Kent County Council, seconded to Kent and Medway Partnership Trust, then as an NHS case officer from 2015 to 2017, then as a part-time community carer. She was reading occupational therapy at the University of Brighton across those years and left the program in her final year to return to the railway. She secured the driver position in 2019 and began training in 2020, the start date pushed back by the pandemic.
She qualified with a Certificate of Competence, Personal Track Safety and an Office of Rail and Road licence to drive trains, assessed on the 375, 376, 377, 465/6 and 707 classes. She drove for Southeastern until July 2024 and has driven mainline services for CrossCountry out of Leicester since August 2024.
Born and raised in Zambia, Fentaman left twenty-five years ago. “I have witnessed appalling behaviour and treatment from members of staff to customers,” she says. “And just the mentality that it’s okay to treat and to be treated like that.” She has been back several times in the years since. “And the poor standards have been normalised. In turn, companies have lost trust and reputation.”
