Senior Management Team

Ken Cunningham has over 35 years of experience in the NHS. He trained as a Biomedical Scientist in Glasgow and worked in both diagnostic and research laboratories before changing career in 1986 to hospital management. He was chief executive of two acute trusts during a 15 career and completed several major change projects including service reconfigurations. He has a special interest in waiting times management and quality improvement. His most recent role was as Managing Director of NHS Pensions where he overseen the implementation of the revised pension scheme regulations in 2008. Ken has an open and direct style of management and believes that all staff should be aware of their unique contribution to the organisations goals.  

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 Lecture 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.

Gary has worked in software development for 15 years in a variety of fields, including the public and private sectors. He has been leading development teams for much of that time, designing innovative, bespoke software and web applications for Microsoft and Oracle platforms. Prior to working with North West e-Health he has worked for private design companies, Education Leeds and Yorkshire Water as well as spending time working for companies in China.

He has worked on large-scale projects for major UK companies and local government informatics solutions. He is particularly interested in developing software that simplifies that use and access of health data across research and healthcare need. He believes in agile, test-driven development methodologies for creating usable, stable software.