The Judges

Dr Glyn Hayes – chair

Dr Glyn Hayes is a medical practitioner who was a GP in Worcester for 25 years. He has been involved with health informatics since the late 70s when he designed one of first consulting room GP computer systems. Glyn is the former chair of the Health Informatics Forum Strategic Panel. He was a founder member of the Primary Health Care Specialist Group of the BCS, its chair from 1985 to 1990 and is currently its president. He is also president of the UK Council for Health Informatics Professionals.
He was the medical director for one of the largest NHS IT suppliers of IT from 1992 until he retired from this post in 2001. He has represented the UK on the International Medical Informatics Association and was the chair of the primary care working Group of IMIA. He has lectured widely around the world and been a keynote speaker at many international conferences.
His informatics interests include making systems which clinicians want to use, improving individual patient care by the application of IT and developing health Informatics into a substantive profession.

Heather Strachan

Heather Strachan has over 20 years experience in eHealth. She is currently The Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions eHealth Lead in the eHealth Directorate in the Scottish Government. Heather, who is a nurse by background, has held a variety of posts, which have involved management, practice development, research and healthcare governance. Heather has a Masters in Information Science from London’s City University. She is a Professional Member of the British Computer Society and a member of the Centre for Health Informatics Research and Development. Heather is a Senior Member of the International Medical Informatics Association and an Honorary Member of their Nursing Informatics Group.

Professor Michael Thick. MA, MB, BChir, FRCS

Michael Thick qualified as a doctor in 1976 from Cambridge University, and trained as a junior doctor in London. He then was made Senior Registrar to Professor Sir Roy Calne in Cambridge, and has set up several transplant units. Until recently he was the Director of liver and Renal Transplantation at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, and was also Chair of the I,M,&T Strategy Committee for the city’s hospitals. Throughout his career he has been active in Health Informatics, having a particular interest in theoretical modelling as a means of understanding and then designing systems to support clinical activity. He was recently seconded to the NHS Information Authority for two years, where he was the Caldicott Guardian, and helped develop the infrastructure required by Caldicott guardians to implement access control and Information Governance within their organisations. He was also Chair of the Clinical Communications Programme Board.
Until September 2006 he was Senior Medical Advisor to the Choose and Book and PACS Programmes, and he was then appointed as Chief Clinical Officer to Connecting for Health. His principle roles are to ensure that patient safety and clinical governance are core values within the National Programme for Information Technology, and to ensure that all clinical disciplines are represented and valued within it.
He maintains his clinical interests by researching “bench to bedside” technologies at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College; in particular the use of genomic technology for the prediction of diseases.

Brendan Major

Brendan joined BT in February 2007 as client engagement director for BT Health London. Working closely with NHS Connecting for Health, Brendan is responsible for ensuring that BT and trusts are both properly engaged with the programme of deployments that are taking place across the capital. Brendan joined BT from Barts and the London NHS Trust where, for the past four years, he was director of ICT running an IT hub serving seven NHS trusts. Whilst at Barts he was also the director of infrastructure for the National Programme for IT in London. Brendan joined the NHS after 10 years as a lecturer and IT director for a major charity.

Linda Davidson

Linda is a director and co-founder of E-Health Media Ltd, publishers of E-Health Insider and EHI Primary Care. A healthcare journalist, and editor, Linda is a former editor of Nursing Times (1988-92) and editorial director of Macmillan Magazines health division (now, publishers of Nursing Times and the Health Service Journal).

Gwyn Thomas

Gwyn returned to Wales in 2005 to join Informing Healthcare as chief executive. Previously, he was chief executive of the NHS Information Authority (NHSIA), which was responsible for developing and managing national infrastructure services that supported the delivery of patient care across the NHS in England. Gwyn led the NHSIA through a highly productive period; overseeing its creation from the merger of a number of pre-existing organisations and shaping it to deliver an extensive portfolio of high profile national projects and services.

Before joining the NHSIA, Gwyn was a board member of a large acute teaching hospital in England with executive responsibilities at various times for patient involvement, clinical and corporate governance, information and IM&T, quality improvement, corporate communications and risk management. Prior to joining the NHS, Gwyn worked in the Electricity Generating Industry in Australia, the UK, France, Hong Kong and India. Gwyn is a visiting professor at Brunel University.