I currently work for King’s College Hospital as a strategy adviser. I have a background in health and care policy in Government, research, politics and the voluntary sector. I have published think tank research and media articles on health inequalities, hospital reconfiguration and NHS and social care reform. In 2011 I was the lead policy adviser for the Labour health front bench during the campaign against the Tory-led NHS reorganisation. I also worked on the campaign for a properly funded and preventive social care system, as the head of policy at British Red Cross. I am active in my local party and organised my ward’s successful election campaign in 2010. I live in King’s Cross with my baby daughter and my NHS speech therapist wife. They both make sure I do not lose touch with front line reality.
I bring to the Central Council my wide expertise and varied experience with contacts in policy, politics, the NHS and social care. I would like to continue on the Central Council to participate in policy formulation and debate, and provide a perspective from a major acute hospital.
I would like the Socialist Health Association to become the forum for friends across the centre left – and occasional alternative viewpoints – to discuss and debate health policy and campaigns. The SHA should, in particular, aim to nurture and develop new and innovative ideas that could further progressive socialist aims, recognising that there are multiple perspectives, competing priorities and alternative routes to realising socialist ideals. Not every policy statement made under the SHA banner should be expected to have had exhaustive endorsement of a quorum; nor should it have to fit into an ideological blueprint. Our value to the Labour movement is as a forum rather than a procedurally-fixated policy setting council.