[1] She chairs the Board of Pension Trustees at the General Medical Council and is a non-executive director at NHS Blood and Transplant.
[4] Kelly completed her Bachelor of Arts from Trinity College, University of Dublin in 1971, where she also earned an MB BCh BAO degree in 1973.
In 1989 she was appointed as Director of the Liver Unit and Consultant Paediatric Hepatologist at Birmingham Women's and Children's NHS Foundation Trust.
She advocated centralizing the Kasai Portoenterostomy (a surgical procedure) for the treatment of Biliary Atresia in infants, citing its ability to greatly enhance bile drainage along with keeping serum bilirubin levels within range, thus improving the patient's quality of life.
[8] She was also part of the team that analyzed the handling of Biliary Atresia patients in England and Wales from 1999 to 2002 in supra-regional centers.
The 4-year survival rate improved to 89%, indicating that surgical outcomes can be enhanced by centralizing care to supra-regional centers.
[9] She also identified the need for prompt transfer of care from pediatric to adult-oriented liver treatment centers for patients who have successfully achieved adulthood.
In a separate study, she demonstrated that AIH patients who underwent a liver transplant took a longer time to recover compared to those who didn't.
She stressed the fact that while liver transplantation is an effective therapeutic option for progressive AISC and AIH, the potential relapse of the primary auto-immune process greatly reduces its outcomes.
[16][17] She has played an integral part in clarifying the optimal use of post-transplant immunosuppression through her role as Chief Investigator of multi-centre clinical trials including the only definitive randomised study of tacrolimus and cyclosporine in children.