Department of Health and Social Care

So I joined them.

And then what was one of the biggest professional privileges was... was at Pfizer and the government wanted somebody who was from the pharmaceutical industry to come in and lead a piece of work across the NHS and the Department of Health.

And all of the pharma companies and diagnostic companies signed an agreement that said they would share their commercial information with me over the duration of my secondment into the Department of Health, which is pretty unheard of because their research and commercial data is very important to them.

So I often say that in interviews and things, that's a mark of the kind of trust I build with people.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

That kind of sense of injustice or remedying injustice or just doing things differently to show how it can be done.

And when I left, you know, I then stayed at the Department of Health and then NHS England.

This has been going on since towards the end of last year, so nearly a year now.

Do you think the end is in sight? I heard a worrying report that in terms of the numbers that the NHS England or the Department of Health thought they could go after, that they thought maybe we're only a seventh of the way through it.

Is it something you think is going to continue for a number of years from now?

I also think we don't know.

It's working with the NHS.

It's working with Department of Health and Social Care.

working with GMC, CQC, Academy, I sit as an observer on GPC England for the college.

So there's a lot of working with different stakeholders, a lot of listening to members.

There is a checklist that GP practices could use to show if they are AI ready.

But what we're keen to do is, again, not just put this straight onto GPs, but push as much of this checklist as high as possible.

So government level, Department of Health and Social Care, icb level so that it's not an individual practice doing it so we are working through that checklist we are doing research into how gps are using ai and what the future looks like we're working with people who have expertise trying to do that in a as you say a rapidly changing field

we're kind of almost at lunchtime on day two is there anything else you're looking forward to before we finish at the end of the day It

I see it as an adjuvant to help towards it.

So relocate civil service departments, maybe like the DH, Department for Health and Social Care, or keep it fully out in the Department for Transport.

Would Derby not be a good place given its... transport links um and i've also advocated no resurrect the government office for the region's network it wasn't an onerous layer of bureaucracy as i said a lot of this joining up will depend on having trust and relationships why is this andrew because it enables decisions to be made faster it enables funding to flow smoother and quicker because we can't fanny around waiting for this to happen so I'd have a regional sub-regional headquarters of government maybe working in hub type campuses with the local authority all the strategic authorities the anchor to encourage that collaborative leadership at the level of place

And those government office of the regions are outposts of the central government departments.

So if we want to change where care happens, we must invest in the capacity and capability that can make this shift of care effective.

Part of your role, you meet with officials and ministers from the Department of Health and NHS England.

Do you get the sense that the new team at the Department of Health in particular understands the issues and challenges facing general practice and are perhaps open to this idea of making sure general practice gets more money?

I have had very constructive discussions with ministers and officials, and I think there is a recognition of the importance of general practice.

And of course, we do welcome that.

As a matter of urgency, we also want to see communication to disabled women in in all primary and secondary care spaces around maternity, birth and the post-birth period is in accessible formats.

And indeed that we would like to see the Department of Health and Social Care look at making an accessibility standard mandatory across the NHS to create a stronger accountability framework.

We need specialism in the system.

And one of the things that we would really love to see is a disability midwife in every ICB.

How had a funeral director been able to operate for so long without the wrongdoing being detected? And what safeguards existed to prevent another business from doing the same thing? Those questions reached the government.

On the day Bush was sentenced, the Department of Health and Social Care announced that it would begin work on proposals for formal regulation of the funeral sector.

The announcement acknowledged the need for stronger protection for bereaved families, but it was a commitment to develop reforms, not a declaration that a complete new regulatory system had already come into force.

That distinction matters, because the legacy case had demonstrated what could happen when the handling of deceased people wasn't subject to sufficiently effective oversight.