David Dalton is Chief Executive of Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust – a University Teaching Hospital employing 4,600 staff, with 900 beds and which has a full range of general and most specialist services.

David has a particular interest in improving patient safety and the quality of the patient experience. He is leading a 3 year programme to achieve the lowest HSMR in the NHS for his Trust and to reduce the incidence of harmful events by 50%. He also leads the development of the North West Improvement Alliance which will build staff capability for quality improvement activity across 60 organisations in the North West of England.

David started his career in hospital management in 1979. He joined the Trust in July 2001 having been Chief Executive at The Walton Centre for Neurology and Neurosurgery NHS Trust in Liverpool for the previous 7 years.
Before coming to the North West, David worked at Barts in London, Queen Mary’s in Kent, the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford and St Thomas’ in London.

R. Alan North is Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences of the University of Manchester and Director of the Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, a federation of six NHS Trusts with the University of Manchester. Alan represents the University of Manchester on the board of NWeH.

Prior to his current position, Alan has held posts at Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine (Associate Professor of Pharmacology), The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Professor of Neuropharmacology), and at the Vollum Institute of Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland (Senior Scientist and Professor). For five years he was Principal Scientist at the Geneva Biomedical Research Institute, a division in Switzerland of GlaxoWellcome Research and Development, and between 1998 and 2004 Alan was Professor of Molecular Physiology at the University of Sheffield.

Professor North’s Research interests are in neuroscience, physiology and pharmacology, centring on quantitative understanding of drug and transmitter action at the level of single cells and single molecules, primarily by biophysical and molecular biological approaches.

He is a past recipient of the Gaddum lectureship of the British Pharmacological Society, and the Annual Prize Review lectureship of The Physiological Society. He holds an honorary DSc from the University of Aberdeen, and he is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and Academia Europa. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1995.

Alan graduated BSc (Physiology), MB ChB (Medicine) and PhD (Pharmacology) from the University of Aberdeen, was a house officer and registrar in Aberdeen hospitals and is registered as a medical practitioner in the U.K.

Mike Burrows is the Chief Executive of Salford Teaching Primary Care Trust where he has worked since 2001. Originally a Doctor of Biochemistry, Mike has worked in the NHS for 22 years, principally in the finance discipline before taking on the Chief Executive role five years ago.

Mike is currently the Chairman of the Association of Greater Manchester PCTs and co-Chairs the Greater Manchester Health Leadership Group, a partnership working forum with local government in the region. He also has leadership roles in Greater Manchester in relation to Research and Development, Pathology and Neurosciences.

Burrinder has spent over 10 years working predominately in healthcare customer focused industries, Corporate Strategy (Deloitte Consulting) and Investment Management (IP Group plc) where he was responsible for the commercialisation of early stage Life Science companies. Previously to his role with NWeH, he was founding Chief Executive Officer of LUTO Research, the patient information optimisation company and CEO of ReactivLab a medical diagnostic company.

An Economics graduate from Cambridge University, Burrinder is also a qualified and practicing pharmacist, holds a doctorate in trans-dermal drug delivery and is a past recipient of The James Watt Memorial Foundation and Sainsbury Management Fellowships.

Iain Buchan is Director of the Northwest Institute for BioHealth Informatics (NIBHI), Clinical Professor of Public Health Informatics at The University of Manchester, and Honorary Consultant in Public Health in the English National Health Service.

Originally from Liverpool, UK, Iain studied medicine and pharmacology there in the late 1980s. As an undergraduate he developed a strong interest in medical statistics and wrote statistical software for clinical researchers - this grew into www.statsdirect.com, which now has around 15,000 users world-wide. As a junior doctor, he also developed an interest in clinical information systems and the co-ordination of healthcare for populations, particularly across the primary-secondary care interface. In the mid-1990s Iain moved his developing health informatics research to Cambridge University at the same time as undertaking public health consultant training in the NHS (Eastern Region). In 2003 he returned to England’s North West to focus his public health and informatics interests into a single research role at the University of Manchester.

Iain's central research interest is ‘e-Epidemiology’, and its contribution to ‘e-Health’, at the population level. ‘e-Epidemiology’ is a fusion of: statistical & mathematical; biomedical; social; economic; and computational thinking, for studying health and disease, across large populations, via e-records. This requires a comprehensive, trans-disciplinary effort. Iain has developed a research team and network, the North West Institute for Bio-Health Informatics (NIBHI), out of the University of Manchester’s new Health Methodology Research Group, in the School of Community Based Medicine, in partnership with the School of Computer Science. This has generated £12m of e-Health research activity. The outputs of the research are not only papers but also software and training to facilitate research in other groups. Some topics, of public health importance, such as obesity epidemiology, are taken into the NIBHI methodology research programme and run as applied research, which becomes a central set of case studies for fast-track methodological development. The methodological focus is the ‘e-Lab’, which is a secure environment for aggregating, anonymising and analysing health-related data from defined populations, for developing health services and enabling scientific research.

John New is the Chief Clinical Officer for NWeH, a Consultant Physician at Salford Royal Foundation Trust with interests in diabetes and obesity, the clinical lead for obesity medicine at SRFT and an honorary Senior Lecturer in Medicine at The University of Manchester.

Through his clinical work John has had an interest in the management and delivery of long term conditions provided by primary and secondary health-carers. This has included numerous health informatics projects including the recent development of the Salford Integrated Record (SIR) project. This provides clinicians within Salford real time access to the integrated medical record, containing details from primary and secondary care, of all people living within Salford. This system went live in June 2009 and is the successor to the Salford Diabetes record, which provided a similar integrated service for all people within Salford who had diabetes, which has been used since 2003.

John’s research interests have been developing better ways of providing and monitoring clinical care, frequently utilising information technology. These projects have included the development of Diabetes Care call where people with diabetes receive some of their care via a call centre staffed by non-medically trained call operatives supported by a diabetes specialist nurse. This project demonstrated the sustained improvements in patient’s diabetes control, and the positive take up of the service by both patients and health care professionals. In 2005 this system was rolled out as a tier 2 service for diabetes management within Salford and is marketed by British Telecom (BT) throughout England.

With colleagues at SRFT and the University of Manchester he has written numerous papers examining the effects of different models of care on outcomes in chronic diseases mostly focusing on diabetes and chronic kidney disease. He has been involved in developing computer assisted programs for identifying people with chronic kidney disease and prompting effective management of these people within the primary care setting. Within Salford he has developed a program for calculating peoples cardiovascular risk score thereby alerting the patient, and the general practitioner to the need for effective preventative care. The cardiovascular risk program will be among the first wave of programs offered by NWeH.