Our Chair
UK-Med chair
Sir John is a GP by background who qualified at Manchester Medical School in 1978 and worked across various teaching hospitals culminating as a GP trainee in inner city Manchester. He joined Manor House Surgery, Glossop in 1983, and was appointed senior partner in 1988.
In 1992, he gained an MBA with Distinction from Manchester Business School; his dissertation was on Continuous Quality Improvement in Primary Health Care. The work in the practice won national awards and in 1995 gained a Prime Ministerial visit which was the beginning of his role as advisor to the Department of Health. A paper on the practice delivered to the first European Forum on quality improvement in health care, led to subsequent invitations to the US and Sweden amongst other countries.
Don Berwick, CEO of the Institute of Health Care Improvement, invited him in 1997 to be part of a national project group with the IHI in Boston, USA, to look at redesigning primary care systems in the US. This was done using the Collaborative method, which Sir John then brought back to the UK and redesigned to deliver large-scale change. He first proposed a primary care collaborative as a Department of Health advisor in 1997 which led to him being asked to create and head the National Primary Care Development Team, which launched in February 2000.
The Primary Care Collaborative became the largest improvement programme in the world covering 32 million patients in 40 months and delivering 72% improvement in access to GPs and substantial reductions in mortality to patients with CHD. Sir John also created the concept of the Healthy Communities Collaborative with residents of deprived areas as the improvement team members. This concept spread as Passion for Life throughout Scandinavia and won UK and EU awards. At the request of a minister, he also worked in education, raising the performance of underperforming pupils in 400 schools.
Sir John was invited by the Australian government to design and train a team to operate a Primary Care collaborative across the whole of Australia, and similarly, Scotland and Saskatchewan in Canada. Additional governments and organisations were also advised. He is a keynote speaker at many international conferences on large scale change, quality and safety and has also presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
John is a published author and has written numerous articles on quality improvement and large system change, and has been a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. He was National Clinical Lead for Quality and Productivity at the Department of Health creating the Year of care finance concept, and for 6 years was a member of the National Quality Board, setting the strategic direction for quality and safety in the NHS. He was Chair of Primary Care at the Global Health Forum presided by Lord Ara Darzi, and Chair of Independent Commission on Whole Person Care whose report One Person One Team One System was widely praised. He is also adjunct professor of Global health Innovation at Imperial College London, and most recently senior independent Director on the Board of the Care Quality Commission England. In 2000, he received the OBE for services to patients and in 2003 was awarded a knighthood for services to the NHS.
