Our current Council

Maggie qualified as a nurse in 1984 and worked for many years in community settings.  Frustrated at how inefficiently and ineffectively information is shared about patients and yet how much is written about them, she found herself working in informatics in 2009 as a clinical transformation facilitator. 

She now works for South Central and West CSU as Clinical Informatics Lead and Clinical Safety Officer, working with CCGs across the south of England to support the safe and effective sharing of clinical information.

She is still frustrated that nursing information isn’t contributing efficiently and effectively to the shared care record and is committed to ensuring that nurses have the skills, processes and tools to take full advantage of digital health opportunities.

Maggie is a Council representative on the Board of Trustees.

Email:

[email protected]

Gerry is a registered nurse originally from Ireland; he has worked in the NHS for 30 years, which includes working in acute hospitals and at Strategic Health Authority level in London; then, after leading several national change programmes, he worked at the Department of Health for some years.

He went from the DH to Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, where he led the nursing documentation and CNIO delivery of the largest (at its time) EPR implementation across 6 of Imperials’ acute sites. Since then, he has been active in informatics and was the previous Chair of the Royal College of Nursing eHealth group and has been involved in some DH EPR-related projects. He has been a CSO on the national NHS England and Wales COVID-19 app.

He now works independently as a Clinical Safety Officer. He promotes the modernisation of clinical safety practices and documentation. He is a board member for one of the most prominent digital medicines projects with Gravitate, an 8-country project to digitalise patient information leaflets in medicines to improve compliance

Lesley is the Scottish Government’s Clinical Lead for Digital Health & Care with a specific responsibility for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals. A physiotherapist by training but has worked in multi professional roles for many years. Lesley has had a lifelong interest in informatics and particularly its criticality in driving improvement. In 2013, she co-founded and has subsequently directed the development of the Scottish NMAHP Digital Health Network and its associated National Digital Leadership Programme and is passionate about developing a digitally enabled workforce.

Lesley has held a number of national positions over the last 20 years including Head of Health Services Research & Effectiveness for Scotland and Director at NHS 24. Lesley is currently leading a number of national and UK level digital and informatics initiatives and is European representative on the WCPT Digital taskforce establishing standards for digital practice. She is also a non-executive Board member and Chair of Bield, the largest Housing Association in Scotland. In 2018, she was named Scottish Digital Impact Leader and Digital Health’s UK Digital Team Leader of the year and has been a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy since 2002. Lesley holds a professorship with Glasgow Caledonian University.

A current GP working the the northeast, Tom also works at NHS England as a clinical lead in the Digital Clinical Informatics domain. He specialises in the use of primary care data and previous work includes the digital response to Covid 19.

His background in public health means Tom enjoys seeing the 'bigger picture' and developing the systems that underpin the health and care service.

Tom also has a keen interest in medical education being a GP trainer and Clinical Lecturer at Newcastle University.

He has led several LGBTQ+ charities.

Email:

[email protected]

Tashfeen is a clinical dentist in primary care and Clinical Teacher in Sedation & Special Care Dentistry. She is also CCIO for a group of dental practices involved in digital transformation and Clinical Safety Officer for health technology organisations to promote and maintain the standards involved to provide safe technology.

Tashfeen has worked as a Leadership fellow with Health Education England in developing a digital dental strategy and has led on the first interoperability proof of concept between NHS111 and primary dental care. She established the digital dental network and held 3 successful conference to highlight and engage with the profession to align dental with the rest of healthcare.  

Sebastian is a General Practitioner based in Cambridge and he also works as Strategic Clinical Lead for Patient Safety for NHS Digital. 

Whilst working as a GP Partner in Cambridge, he was director of the first Out of Hours Services in the area, Cambridge Doctors on Call,  later called Urgent Care Cambridgeshire  and was involved this organisations expansion to cover Cambridgeshire.  He helped move this organisation from paper to electronic records. He also sat on the Board of the Cambridge CCG/PCT and CCG in many different roles.

At NHS Digital he chairs the NHS Digital Clinical Safety Group and works closely with other members of the NHS Digital Clinical Safety Team.   He is involved with delivery of the Digital Clinical Safety training which promotes the Health IT Safety Standards (DCB0129 and DCB 0160). Prior to this he worked as the one of the First National Clinical leads for the Choose and Book programme (now called the Electronic Referral Service) before working as Clinical Safety Officer for the same programme.

He was elected as a Founding Fellow of the Faculty of Clinical Informatics in 2017 and has been chairing the FCI Clinical Safety Special Interest Group since 2020. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners in 2018.

He is passionate to ensure that all new emerging technologies are safe, Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning pose particular challenges to ensure that these new technologies have been clinical assured as safe. He is also keen to ensure that there is improved National support and guidance for Clinical Safety Officers working in the NHS and industry.

Sarah Thompson is a Pharmacist and CCIO at Stockport NHS Foundation Trust. Specialising in EPMA deployment in 2011, Sarah has worked on both Trust and supplier side and, following a number of years as the clinical lead for EPR & digital optimisation, was appointed as CCIO in 2021. Sarah is proud to be one of the first Pharmacist CCIO’s nationally, raising the profile at every opportunity.

A passionate advocate for career development for the non-medical CCIO, Sarah is determined to see further representation from Pharmacy, AHP, Nursing and Midwifery colleagues nationally. As a Clinical Safety Officer, Sarah has an active interest in embedding robust clinical safety processes and maintaining clinical safety in how digital systems are used in practice. Sarah studied as part of the first cohort of the NHS Digital Academy, going on to complete her MSc dissertation focussing on clinical engagement.

Lydia is a practising doctor in Otolaryngology and currently works as a Health Consultant in Digital Transformation for Atos.  Prior to this Lydia was the Programme Lead for the NHS Digital Academy and has also worked as a Clinical Informatics Fellow at the RCP Health Informatics Unit. 

Lydia holds a Master’s degree in Health Informatics awarded by University College London and has published original research on informatics competencies for front-line clinicians.  This work has contributed to the development of the FCI Core Competencies Project, which she is now contributing towards as a Project Consultant.

Lydia's informatics interests lie in education and change management.

Visiting Professor in the School of Computing at Newcastle University, and previously a principal in General Practice in Northumberland, Nick has combined patient care with Health Informatics since 1987. His main areas of interest have been in health and care record interoperability, Health Terminologies, Professional Record Standards in Health and Social Care, and the creation of federable regional inter-organisational health and social care information networks.

He has held posts in the DH and NHS working on Read Codes and SNOMED-CT, in Newcastle University working in decision support, was Director of Health Informatics at BT Global, Director for Clinical Data Standards in DH Informatics and HSCIC, and was part of the Connected Health Cities team at Newcastle University who began the design work on the Great North Care Record (2015-2019).

Email:

[email protected]