About FitCheck Clinic

I’m Darren, one of the founders and co-director of FitCheck Clinic Ltd. My career in healthcare started back in 2010 – after qualifying as a nurse I initially worked on a busy surgical ward before later moving on to be a Cardiothoracic Intensive Care Nurse within Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. These first few years of acute hospital experience allowed me to acquire and grow in various clinical skills, making me a confident and competent health professional. 

I was then able to go on to gain further education and become an Occupational Health Nurse, taking referrals directly from GPs and employers to assess people in order to improve their health or find suitable reasonable adjustments to enable them to comfortably return to their existing working roles. From my time there, I became self-assured as an independent Health Professional, managing my time, patients and clinics alone in addition to working as part of a greater team.

After all of my time in Hospital and clinic settings, I was then skilled enough to take on a new challenging role as a Specialist Nurse in Metabolic Diseases out in the community cover a large territory across the UK. My job was initially to assess, teach and treat a large group of patients in their own homes, so they could avoid spending many days out of their lives regularly travelling to far off specialist hospitals. This role further grew to encompass targeted chemotherapies and other community nursing responsibilities.

After a more than a decade on the front lines of healthcare, I decided to focus all my knowledge into clinical education roles instead. I have taught health professionals many topics, such as managing difficult intubations when patients cannot breathe, to managing renal replacement therapy when someone’s kidneys are not working and most recently staging liver disease.

A constant frustration for me has been the barriers people facing to accessing health services quickly and effectively – I know first hand the problems of short staffing and the extensive waiting lists. This isn’t the fault of  my fellow hard working health professionals, but now I am in a position where I have the knowledge and resources to make a difference and alongside my excellent co-founder, Wendy, we have created FitCheck Clinic to give anyone easy access to a health professional and the tests that can help change, improve and sometimes save peoples lives.