About Me

My main interest is the future; what will the service be like in 2040, what about NHS100, will there still be an NHS in 2048 but here is a little bit the past.

I was born and brought up in Glasgow and educated there;  I also went to the University in Glasgow.  After Medical School I went into surgery but moved from surgery to public health in 1972, principally because I was fascinated by the debate of the sixties on the nature of high blood pressure, namely whether there was such a thing as a disease called high blood pressure or whether it was a normally distributed variable.   The topic was not discussed much in surgery at that time.

I started work for the City of Oxford as a Local Government employee and moved to the NHS in 1974 with the rest of the Public Health Service.   Since that time I have carried out a number of different jobs in public health.   In the last twenty years, my responsibilities have included being Programmes Director of the UK National Screening Committee, the Director of the National Library for Health, and the Chief Knowledge Officer of the NHS.

Working in Oxford has been wonderful due to the gathering of epidemiologists and people interested in knowledge and evidence, much of this a consequence of Richard Doll’s enlightened leadership.   I owe particular debts of thanks to many people but Iain Chalmers has been the person who has influenced me most over the years.   I have also had a wonderful team who have compensated for my weaknesses and put their own creative stamp on the work we have done together.

I now work part-time for the NHS, being employed by the Oxford Radcliffe Trust, and my current responsibility is to lead the workstream called Doing the Right Things with Phil da Silva, helping patients, clinicians, managers and commissioners decide the right thing to do, as distinct from doing things right.

In the part of my life in which I don’t work in the NHS, I am the Director of a charity called Knowledge Into Action which supports the Campaign for Greener Healthcare and the National Campaign for Walking.   I have also set up the Oxford Centre for Healthcare Transformation and our mission there is to help individuals and organisations transform healthcare by:

• developing systems;
• changing the culture;
• involving citizens as full partners;
• managing knowledge as though it were money;
• exploiting the Internet relentlessly.

F0r the future I would like to work with Ara Darzi to involve young people on a project called 2040 to give them the confidence to create solutions that will ensure the NHS is alive and well in 2040 or even 2048