ACUTE FRAILTY NETWORK TEAM BIOGRAPHIES
Professor Simon Conroy
Simon’s ambition is to improve outcomes for frail older people by embedding evidence based medicine into clinical practice (‘campus to clinic’ translational research). His research addresses different models of care for frail older people, assessing feasibility as well as clinical and cost-effectiveness. His educational activities take an interdisciplinary perspective on developing and teaching knowledge locally (frailty services), nationally (BGS) and internationally (EUGMS & EAMA). Implementation of research findings into clinical practice is key, and best exemplified by work on the Silver Book and the Acute Frailty Network.
Deborah Thompson
Deborah Thompson MSC, Dip HE, RGN is a Director at NHS Elect Director covering Urgent Care Delivery Networks. This involves leading the design and delivery of two large-scale improvement programmes across the UK; The Ambulatory Emergency Care Network and Acute Frailty Network. In addition, she also designs bespoke programme support and expertise to frontline teams to improve emergency care. Deborah has 37 years’ experience as a clinician and manager in NHS acute services.
During her career, Deborah has undertaken a variety of roles from Ward Sister through to ‘acting’ Director of Nursing. In 2003, she diversified her career path by undertaking the role of general manager in Emergency Services leading to a role as Director of Operations. Since then she has worked on a number of national healthcare improvement programmes and since 2011 has focussed on improving emergency flow leading the improvement and expansion of ambulatory emergency care (AEC) services in over 120 organisations in the UK. This work expanded to include the Acute Frailty Network in 2015 that aims to improve the quality and safety of emergency care for frail older people in the first 72 hours. She is passionate about working with front line staff to support them to understand and improve emergency patient flow, and has a particular interest in clinical pathway redesign and working with health communities on a large scale to design processes to safely provide ‘same day’ emergency care reducing the reliance on hospital beds for treatment and ensuring frail older people don’t spend a day longer than necessary in a hospital bed.
Dr Sally Briggs
Sally graduated from the University of Birmingham medical school in 1997 and following house jobs in the West Midlands completed her junior doctor training in the North West. She was appointed as a consultant geriatrician at the Wythenshawe site of Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust in 2010. Sally works clinically in an acute frailty service in ED and on AMU and is Divisional Medical Director for Unscheduled Care.
Sally is an Honorary Senior Lecturer for Manchester and Salford universities for her undergraduate teaching and role as module lead for an MSc in Geriatric medicine. She is interested is how we aim to provide high quality acute care for frail older people accessing secondary care and so is a clinical associate for both the Emergency Care Improvement Programme and Acute Frailty network.
Outside of work Sally enjoys to run (slowly), go on holiday and be greeted enthusiastically by the dog as her three children have moved onto the grunting stage!
Professor
Finbarr C Martin
Finbarr Martin
is an emeritus consultant in Geriatric Medicine at Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS
Foundation Trust in London. He retired from clinical practice in 2016, having
worked in and developed a broad range of acute and community services for older
people over 30 years. He has over 120 peer-reviewed publications: mostly
research is into the geriatric syndromes of falls, frailty and delirium, and
health services evaluations of intervention related to these syndromes. He has
a personal chair in Medical Gerontology at King’s College London and is
currently supervising 2 PhD students on frailty related topics. He was a
non-executive director of NICE 2013-2016, president of the British Geriatrics
Society 2010-12 and is currently president-elect of the European Union
Geriatric Medicine Society. He is currently academic lead for the frailty theme
of the NIHR North West London CLAHRC.
Simon Griffiths Career profile
Improvement Coach / Strategic and Operational Director
Values and results driven senior strategic and operational leader in a variety of NHS, third sector and education organisations.
Commissioning and provider experience in acute, community and primary care services. Led complex multi-site services with a track record of delivering improved quality, better value combined with great engagement. Successful service and strategy development.
Current roles:
Director of NHS Elect:
Working primarily as an improvement coach with 8 acute trusts across the country as part of the Acute Frailty Network (AFN).
Co-ordinating cancer improvement work across Midlands & East.
Seconded part time to the New Care Models team to work with multi-speciality community provider (MCP) vanguards across Midlands & East.
Chair / Trustee of Heritage Care – medium sized national charity providing supported living to older people and those with learning disabilities and mental health needs.
Previous experience
Roles of Director of Strategy and Director of Operations for Derbyshire Community Health Services NHS Foundation Trust:
Developed integrated service models with statutory and third sector partners, led much of the FT establishment work, and established the Trust’s first commercial strategy
Previously worked in London for 20 years at Board level in commissioning and acute, community and primary care provider organisations.
Chair of Governors in a Hackney primary school and Derbyshire secondary school academy.
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Matt Thomas MB FRCP FRCPEdin
A Consultant Geriatrician at Poole Hospital since 1995, last century he led the Dorset Guidelines for Falls, this century turning to Intermediate Care and Interface Geriatrics in the Poole area. This has involved award winning developments with both community providers (Woodlands and Poole Intermediate Care Service) and in the acute unit (Rapid Access to Consultant Evaluation).
Outside clinical medicine Matt has had roles (managerial and educational) locally, regionally and nationally and is on the faculty of the Acute Frailty Network.
He has spoken nationally (eg Royal College of Emergency Medicine, RCP Edinburgh) and internationally (Taiwan and Hong Kong) on intermediate care and the inception and use of frailty units in the modern care of older people.
Unfortunately, as the years pass he feels that he has more in common with his patients than he likes to admit.
Mandy Rumley-Buss MA, BSc, RN
Mandy trained
at St Thomas Hospital and has over 30 year’s experience in Healthcare. She has had
an eclectic career working in various Nursing and management roles in Primary,
community and Secondary care as well as a seconded post as clinical lead within
a PCT. Her posts include Nurse Consultant in Emergency & Urgent care,
Senior lecturer, Clinical Nurse Specialist, project manager and General Manager
to name a few. Within her roles she has led transformational change across
healthcare. Mandy is a Non Medical prescriber and as such was Trust lead in
prescribing and in the development of an academy of prescribing within Dorset.
She has also been involved in the development of Nurse Practitioners in
Emergency and Acute medical care, Community Hospitals and the development of one
of the first Emergency Care Practitioner degree courses with Bournemouth
University.
Mandy was a
contributor to the Silver Book, RCN BEST staffing tool and was involved in the
development of competencies in AEC within Kings College Hospital and more
recently in development of RCN emergency care competencies in older people. She
has presented at several National and International conferences on clinical and
managerial subjects and has written articles relating to Older people and
emergency care.
Matt Tite
For the last 15 years I have spent most of my time directly supporting healthcare organisations. Working with clinical staff, board members, directs and operational managers. Designing, promoting and supporting the delivery of products and services, such as the national analyst training programme (a 12 day course run over 6 months), the development of an improvement faculty in NHS Lothian and developing QI doctors in the Wessex Deanery, amongst many others.
As an improvement analyst I have extensively enjoyed helping teams and individuals apply measurement for Improvement techniques within a variety of clinal areas to identify areas of concern / interest. This process includes, assisting teams gather the correct data and appreciate variation, and spot any signals from the ‘noise’ in the system. Linking this to return on investment principles is often a great tool to help with the change management.
In NHS Lothian, I work as a part of the improvement faculty where we run an organisational development programme. I helped setup the faculty, I regularly run development sessions and learning events for the delegates, coaches and improvement analysts. We now have over 25 coaches and 20 improvement analysts supporting 5 cohorts of improvers. This year will be our 3rd year.
I have worked for the Acute Frailty Network (AFN) for the last 3 years. I present at all the national events, I run the measurement masterclass and created all the tools that the sites use to understand if they have made any improvement. I provide strategic advice on programme development and operational support to AFN network sites.
I am an expert in Minitab, MS Excel and MS Access and created have created numerous national toolkits for the NHS, including the Royal College of Physicians, the NHS institute for innovation and NHS Elect.
Dr Jay Banerjee
Jay is a Consultant in Geriatric Emergency Medicine at the University
Hospitals of Leicester; Honorary Professor in Emergency Care and Academic
Champion in Clinical Leadership, University of Leicester; Visiting Professor in
Safety Sciences at Loughborough University, UK. He has extensive experience of educational,
academic and improvement initiatives to improve care of frail older people at
local, regional, national and international levels and continues to collaborate
on health services and research collaborations including a new international
version of the UK “Silver Book”. Jay has a Master’s in Educational
Research, a Diploma in Professional Coach-Mentoring and is currently working
towards a master’s in Medical Law and Ethics to develop his practice around
ethical and legal frameworks as applied to frail older people. Previously
he has been a Health Foundation/ IHI Fellow (Cambridge, MA, USA), led on
developing NICE guidelines and been an Expert Advisor to the NICE Centre for Clinical
Guidelines. He presents and teaches widely and offers consultation services for
service improvement via his company. He also co-developed and delivers a course
on integrated approach to safety including Human Factors Ergonomics and
Improvement Science.
Lisa Godfrey
Lisa has 30 years’ experience in the NHS, and is an experienced leader of transformational change and improvement. Prior to joining NHS Elect as a Director in 2013, Lisa held a variety of executive director roles in acute Trusts and the charitable sector; including the Directorships for Strategy and Service Transformation, and Campaign Director for Patient Experience. Lisa, who is a nurse by background, has led a number of significant projects including service reconfiguration and major capital builds, cultural change programmes and within the charitable sector set up a UK pipeline for system redesign projects. Lisa uses a combination of service improvement and programme management approaches with social movement techniques.
Recent accomplishments: In her campaign director role Lisa was the lead for Patient and Public Involvement, developing the Trust’s patient and public engagement strategy, including the creation of networks of users, and a database to bring together the 10,000 trust members and patient participants as a powerful user voice.
Dr David Hunt
David has been an NHS consultant for 13 years specialising in Medicine for Older People, Clinical Leadership, and Safeguarding Adults at Risk. David is the Clinical Director for Medicine for Older People & Neurosciences at Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and has led and developed the department for the last ten years. He currently works as an acute geriatrician and leads the acute frailty unit at Worthing Hospital which opened in December 2008. He was the clinical lead for the redesign of acute frailty services, delivered via the Emergency Floor at Worthing Hospital, an RCP Future Hospitals Commission development site.
David is the Trust Safeguarding Lead and has worked actively in West Sussex leading the awareness raising of Safeguarding Adults at Risk and contributing to policy and strategic development. He was a member of the Department of Health NHS Advisory Group, which developed the NHS guidance on Safeguarding. David designed the local community geriatrics service as part of a multi-organisation urgent care system redesign in 2010. He now works for Coastal West Sussex CCG as a Clinical Lead for Older People and helped redesign preventative community services into community based co-located multi-disciplinary Proactive Care teams to case manage older people with frailty.
In addition to working with the AFN, David is the clinical lead for the Living well for Longer Programme at Kent, Surrey and Sussex Academic Health Science Network having a passion for spreading the evidence based of best practice for older people’s services across the region and nation through bringing together like minded enthusiasts in the quest of outstanding care for older people with frailty.
