Conrad Foote, CEO, Instructor & Trainer
Professional Bio
Conrad is an experienced trainer, consultant, charity leader and service manager specialising in lifesaving education, participation and co-production, safeguarding, and inclusive practice. His career spans public health, children and young people’s services, community engagement and international development in the UK and Cambodia.
As Founder Trustee and Trainer of SWIM Cambodia, Conrad leads work to reduce childhood drowning through Water Safety, Rescue, First Aid and CPR education. Since founding the charity in 2015, he has developed partnerships, training resources and programmes alongside organisations including UNICEF and the RNLI, helping raise more than £250,000 to support drowning prevention.
His approach places participation and local ownership at the centre of programme development. He has co-designed drowning-prevention resources with children, young people and caregivers and supported teacher training to build lifesaving knowledge and skills within communities. A particular focus has been the localisation and capacity building of drowning prevention in Cambodia, including supporting the implementation of Cambodian NGO Hile Teuk Kampuchea (HTK) in 2023 and the development of sustainable, Cambodian-led delivery.
Conrad holds an MSc in International Public Health, with research exploring community perceptions of childhood drowning and prevention in Cambodia through focus groups with adult and adolescent caregivers. This participatory research helped inspire the establishment of SWIM Cambodia.
A qualified children’s nurse, Conrad has extensive First Aid and lifesaving experience. In 2026 he qualified as a Paediatric First Aid Instructor, First Aid at Work Instructor and AED Instructor and completed the TQUK Level 3 Award in First Aid at Work. His previous training includes Advanced Paediatric Life Support, Community Lifesaving Instructor and National Pool Lifeguard qualifications.
His wider lifesaving work includes developing First Aid and Naloxone overdose-prevention training, an initiative that has helped save 26 lives since 2018, and coordinating a multi-agency Super Life Saving Day that taught resuscitation skills to more than 260 students. Following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, he also volunteered as a paediatric nurse in Banda Aceh, working alongside Indonesian medical staff.
Participation and co-production have been consistent themes throughout Conrad’s career. He has led service-user participation and creative projects with young people, undertaken participatory research, co-designed educational resources with communities and developed co-produced digital mental health resources. In Cambodia, his consultancy experience included co-production on a child safeguarding education project and using participatory and visual approaches to support gender-based violence prevention.
Alongside his training, consultancy and charity work, Conrad brings senior leadership experience from children and young people’s mental health services in Brighton & Hove. His work includes service mobilisation, parent engagement, co-production, safeguarding and the safe delivery of psychological therapies within voluntary-sector and NHS partnerships.
Safeguarding and inclusion underpin his practice. Conrad has worked as a Designated Safeguarding Officer and safeguarding and CQC compliance lead. His professional development includes safer recruitment, professional boundaries, refugee and asylum-seeker awareness, equity, diversity and inclusion, allyship, anti-racist practice, inclusive recruitment and gender-based analysis.
Across more than three decades of health, charity and community work, Conrad has developed a strong commitment to working with people rather than simply designing interventions for them. He brings this experience to training, facilitation, co-production, programme development and consultancy, with particular strengths in First Aid and lifesaving education, participatory practice, safeguarding, inclusion, localisation and community capacity building.