Professor Bartlett was a Wellcome Trust Health Services Research Fellow during her doctoral research. She has been a Consultant in Forensic Psychiatry for 24 years and has worked in the community and in open, low secure and medium secure hospital settings. She worked clinically in HMP/YOI Holloway from 2006 until shortly before its closure. She was Clinical Director for Offender Care at Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL) from 2010-2016. CNWL provides primary care, mental health and substance misuse services to 13 secure establishments (Young Offender Institutes, adult prisons and Immigration Removal Centres) in London and the South East of England as well as a range of hospital, community and court based services.

From 2014-2019,Professor Bartlett was Clinical Director for the Health in Justice Programme NHS England (London) Strategic Clinical Network. She sits on the Department of Health Clinical Reference Group for the national Health in the Justice System Programme. She also sat on the NICE Guideline Committee for the Mental Health of People in Prison.

Professor Bartlett has published extensively in the field of forensic mental health. Her main research interests are social exclusion and mental health (with particular reference to women and sexual orientation) and the culture of secure institutions. Early work was on the experiences of gay men and lesbian women of mental health care. Doctoral research led to the publication of "Secure Lives: the Meaning and Importance of Culture in Secure Hospital Care ( OUP 2015).

Previous work on pathways of care for women offenders was incorporated into Department of Health strategy in this area and informed service development for the National Probation Service in London. She is currently involved in NIHR funded research on interventions with women in prison who self –harm. Recent work on adolescents in Secure Care,   “Secure Settings for Young People: a National Scoping Exercise” was undertaken for NHSE.

She is an experienced university teacher and was Course Director of the MSc and Diploma in Forensic Mental Health at St George's, University of London for 15 years. Her current interest is in developing medical humanities teaching at SGUL. She is responsible for teaching on “Psychopathy and Detective Fiction”, “Multi-media Representations of Illness” and “Trauma and War: Identity, Survival and Legacy”. She is also involved in innovative teaching with Birkbeck, University of London, bringing together arts and humanities students with medical students in the interdisciplinary teaching module “Finding a Leg to Stand On: Clinical, Critical and Creative Approaches to the Human Body”.  These proposals are based on the need to create medical practitioners who can acknowledge and work with ideas and beliefs beyond bioscience. They are intended as stimulating introductions to material in the arts that relate to key topics in medicine.