Speaker Profiles
2024
Dr Julian Brown
GP, PCN Clinical Director & Eclipse Clinical Lead
Dr Julian Brown is a General Practitioner in West Norfolk and founder of Eclipse Solutions. He set this up in 2006 as a not-for profit organisation dedicated to addressing health inequalities. His web-based systems are now protecting more than 28 million patients.
He has been a GP for 27 years and has had a special interest in diabetes since 2006. He was the GP Prescribing Lead for Norfolk from 2008-2013 and the Long Term Conditions Lead for West Norfolk CCG from 2013-2015. He is considered one of the leading experts on admission avoidance systems and is researching the improvement of outcomes through automated patient feedback, best practice identification and patient self-management plans.
He is passionate about optimising health economics and admission avoidance through equality of care population health management.
Prof Anthony J Avery OBE
NHSE National Clinical Director for Prescribing
Professor Tony Avery, OBE, is National Clinical Director for Prescribing for NHS England. He is also a GP in Nottingham and Professor of Primary Health Care at the University of Nottingham.
He is passionate about ensuring the safe, effective and appropriate use of medicines and has worked in partnership with healthcare professionals and patients over 30 years to drive forward research and policy development in prescribing and patient safety.
He has led a number of major studies investigating the frequency, nature and causes of prescribing safety problems in the NHS. He has also developed effective methods for tackling hazardous prescribing, most notably the pharmacist-led, IT-based intervention called PINCER, which has now been rolled out nationally to general practices in England.
Tony’s work recognises the vital role that medicines have in treating illness and helping people live with long-term conditions, while acknowledging that prescribing of a medicine is not always the best solution. He is committed to ensuring health care professionals and patients have the information and support they need for shared decision making about whether a prescription is needed and, if so, how to balance the effectiveness and safety of medicines alongside the costs to the patient, the NHS and the environment.
Professor Simon Kenny OBE
National Clinical Director for Children and Young People
Professor Simon Kenny graduated in 1990 from the University of Birmingham and underwent general and paediatric surgical training in Liverpool and Melbourne. He was appointed as consultant paediatric surgeon to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in 2003.
His surgical interests include minimally invasive paediatric surgery and urology. He has developed research interests in regenerative medicine and long-term outcomes in paediatric surgery. As clinical director from 2009-2016 he played a key role in delivering Alder Hey’s strategic plan to become a world leading children’s hospital including moving to the multiple award-winning new hospital Alder Hey in the Park.
Since 2017 Simon has been the national clinical lead for paediatric surgery in the GIRFT programme concentrating the most complex surgery in fewer centres and reducing thousands of unnecessary surgical procedures in children. He is a national clinical adviser and board member of the National Clinical Improvement Programme which gives clinicians benchmarked outcomes of their treatments.
Simon was awarded OBE in 2024 for services to paediatric surgery.
Professor Ramsey Cutress
Professor of Breast Surgery University of Southampton and University Hospital Southampton
Ramsey Cutress is Professor of Breast Surgery in Southampton and clinical lead of the Southampton Breast Unit. His research interests include patient and host determinants of breast cancer outcomes including ethnicity, genetic predisposition, immunological and lifestyle factors.
He is lead investigator for the HTA funded EndoNET neo-adjuvant endocrine therapy trial and a member of the POSH study research team investigating breast cancer in young women. He serves as topic advisor for the NICE Breast Cancer Guidelines, is breast sub-specialty editor for the Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and is a member of the Association of Breast Surgery (ABS) Clinical Practice and Standards Committee.
Dr Clare Hambling
NHS National Clinical Director for Diabetes and Obesity
Dr Clare Hambling is the National Clinical Director for Diabetes and Obesity, NHS England. Clare is a General Practitioner and continues to work as a GP in Norfolk, where she has been based for over 25 years. She has held a range of leadership roles in Norfolk and Waveney over the past 10 years.
She has a long-held interest in Diabetes, Obesity and Cardiometabolic Disease and, until taking up post as NCD with NHS England, was co-clinical lead for Norfolk and Waveney’s award-winning PHM programme, Protect-NoW. She strongly advocates for the use of data and data insights in clinical practice, and how we can use data to improve outcomes and quality of care, both locally and nationally.
Dr Robin Gore
East of England Respiratory Clinical Lead
Dr Robin Gore is a consultant respiratory physician at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust. His main specialist clinical interest is in severe asthma and allergic airways disease. Addenbrooke’s Hospital is home to the east of England severe asthma network hub. The severe asthma team has built a region-wide inclusive holistic service for those with severe asthma – adopting, developing and sharing models of network care over the years. He is currently working with partners to explore how to identify patients with severe asthma at an earlier stage of their illness, with the aim of improving access to life-changing medication.
He has a research interests also include local clinical trials delivery and aeroallergen exposure. He studied the latter during PhD studies at the University of Manchester. He is a clinical co-lead for the NHS England Respiratory Network (East of England) which has delivered service improvement projects in the fields of MART therapy roll-out, housing policy initiatives, and asthma HCP education.
Catherine Green
Eclipse Patient Engagement Lead
Catherine is the Engagement Lead for ECLIPSE. She is a registered mental Health nurse with over 30 years experience working with vulnerable patients in both hospital and community settings. More recently she worked in the NHS with adults with severe and enduring mental health problems as part of a community Mental Health team.
Dr Max Yates
Clinical Associate Professor and Honorary Consultant Rheumatologist
Dr Max Yates is a Clinical Associate Professor, consultant rheumatologist at the Norfolk & Norwich University Hospital and part of the national leadership team for Polymyalgia Rheumatica (PMR). He specialises in epidemiology of rheumatic diseases. He is formally working wth ECLIPSE to improve management of PMR.
His current interests include investigating comorbidity in Polymyalgia Rheumatica (PMR), Giant Cell Arteritis (GCA) and inflammatory polyarthritis.
He carries out clinical trials in rheumatic diseases and is one of the co-investigators on the NIHR HTA sterling trial. He is leading on updating the British Society for Rheumatology guidelines for the treatment of PMR.
Dr James Ferguson
East of England Primary Care Lead for Genomics
Dr Ferguson works as a GP in a deprived ‘Deepend’ surgery in central Cambridge. He is Associate Director At Eclipse and East of England Primary Care Lead for Genomic Medicine with the NHS Genomic Medicine Service.
Prior to retraining as a GP, Dr Ferguson worked both in the fields of academic paediatric neurology, and spent nearly a decade running European research for two large pharmaceutical companies in both the public and private sector.
He has a passion for work addressing equity of care within the NHS, undertaking a fellowship with the NHS England Health Inequalities team, and is a trustee of a local Cambridge homeless charity.
Dr Sebastian Brown
Eclipse Digital Transformation Lead
Dr Sebastian Brown is a hospital clinician who was part of the award-winning COVID PROTECT team, providing the optimisation and support for healthcare in vulnerable patient groups through virtual hubs.
He leads on Eclipse’s digital patient engagement platform which aims to improve population health management and equitable patient-led care, while reducing workload and cost to the NHS.