HSJ100: The wild cards

The last 20 spaces of the HSJ100 include the “wild cards” – people who are not exercising power at the very highest level but should be

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Dr Hannah Barham-Brown

Dr Barham-Brown is training to be a GP in Leeds and is active in the British Medical Association. She is also in a wheelchair and is a disability and gender equity advocate – she is deputy leader of the Women’s Equality Party.

Mark Britnell

Mr Britnell is chairman and senior partner for the global health practice at KPMG but has often been mooted as a contender for the job of running the NHS. With experience in both the NHS and internationally, could 2021 be the year he finally applies for the top job?

Frank Burns

Mr Burns is managing director at Unipart Logistics, which runs all the NHS Supplies lorries and NHS warehouses. With a potential covid second wave and Brexit to cope with, he will be playing a key part in ensuring the NHS has a more resilient logistics this winter and beyond.

Ha-Joon Chang

Mr Chang is reader in the political economy of development, Cambridge University, and author of 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. He makes us think hard about what is “inevitable” – such as the adoption of market principles in the NHS – and shows this is far from the case.

Baroness Julia Cumberlege

Baroness Cumberlege’s leadership of her recent commission – the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review – has been outstanding and her quest to see justice done to the lives of women who have endured the most horrendous trauma has been a masterclass in sensitivity and sagacity.

Natasha Curry

Social care will be one of the big issues over the next year. Ms Curry, deputy director of policy at the Nuffield Trust, has carried out seminal work on social care policy including international comparisons with Japan and Germany, comparisons within the four countries of the UK and the principles underpinning well organised social care, including funding.

Dr Jeanelle de Gruchy

Dr de Gruchy is president of the Association of Directors of Public Health. Her voice – and those of other DPHs – will be crucial over the next year as the country struggles to recover from covid, and local teams are likely to become more prominent in contact tracing and local lockdowns.

Professor Carl Heneghan

Professor Heneghan’s voice has increasingly been heard during the covid crisis– sometimes contrarian, sometimes pointing out the obvious that others have missed such as how recording of covid deaths meant anyone with diagnosed covid would be classed as dying from it eventually. He’s director of the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine at Oxford University.

Dr Mike Holmes

Dr Holmes is joint vice chair at the Royal College of General Practitioners and a partner at the expanding and successful Haxby Group in York and Hull with a particular interest in developing general practice at scale and developing a multi-professional workforce. He is a director of Nimbus Care, which brings together four large practices. He argues building trust and relationships between those involved in such schemes is the way ahead.

Dr Farzana Hussain

Dr Hussain is an innovative GP and primary care network lead in East London, who co-chairs the national PCN network. She is an advocate of team-based care who is acutely aware that GPs are now dealing with a changed demographic and seeing conditions which did not exist in the past – and their response to these needs to change as well.

Professor Partha Kar

Professor Kar is national specialty adviser in diabetes and is a challenging patient-focused voice in this important area of care. He fought hard to get the latest self-monitoring technology funded by the NHS and in use across the country. He is an ardent social media user and is seen as being both courageous and respected.

Shaun Lintern

The former HSJ patient safety correspondent is using his new platform as health correspondent at the Independent to shine a powerful light on many NHS and social care issues, particularly safety. His coverage will become more influential as the NHS struggles to restore services whilst maintaining readiness for further waves of covid-19 infection.

Professor Sir Simon Lovestone

Sir Simon is professor of translational neuroscience at Oxford University and a renaissance thinker about the interplay between scientific discovery, digital and other technology, industry and healthcare delivery - a truly strategic thinker on a global level. He could be what is needed to guide us through the emergence from covid-19.

Louis Mosley

Mr Mosely is chief executive of Palantir UK, which provided the platform for covid management across government. He has quietly and successfully landed one of the most difficult brands in the world into the NHS and it is spreading across the NHS and government. So far this has gone well and there is a good chance that the company’s – and his – influence will grow over the next year.

Professor David Oliver

Professor Oliver is a former Department of Health advisor and British Geriatrics Society president whose British Medical Journal column tackling difficult and contentious issues seems to capture the zeitgeist for many of his colleagues. His job as a consultant in geriatrics and acute general medicine keeps him grounded while his social media presence ensures a high profile.

Baroness Onora O’Neill

As NHS regulation comes under ever more scrutiny, philosopher Baroness Onora’s 2002 Reith Lectures appear uncannily prophetic about the failure of regulation culture: “Serious and effective accountability, I believe, needs to concentrate on good governance, on obligations to tell the truth and on intelligent accountability. I think we need to fantasise much less about Herculean micro-management by means of performance indicators or total transparency. If we want a culture of public service, professionals and public servants must in the end be free to serve the public rather than their paymasters.”

George Orwell

Those of all political persuasions and none can normally find something to admire in Eric Blair’s writings. His distrust of totalitarianism, his social commentary and his focus on clear writing all carry lessons for the NHS and beyond – as does his commitment to free speech in an open society.

Dr Rebecca Rosen

Dr Rosen’s work on primary care at scale and on continuity of care in general practice address key issues for primary care networks. As a senior fellow in health policy at the Nuffield Trust, she is an advocate of local solutions rather than national dictats on issues such as the design and delivery of new forms of general practice and the implementation of technology in general practice.

Tessa Walton

Ms Walton has been seconded to NHS England to work on the covid and flu vaccination programme from her day job at NHS London. This high-profile role will involve navigating between the various organisations involved as well as keeping the Treasury on side. Ms Walton is seen as having the skills to do this, though she risks being the fall guy if things don’t go to plan.

Dr Zoe Williams

Dr Williams may be familiar to many from her media appearances, including as Amazon in the Sky series Gladiators but she is passionate about improving the UK’s fitness and lifestyle. She founded Fit4LifeCIC, which helps young people towards improved physical activity and wellbeing and is a director of the British Society for Lifestyle Medicine.