Development School 2019 Speaker and Workshop Leader Biographies

Plenary speakers

1025

Morning Plenary

Jim McManus

Prof Jim McManus OCDS, CPsychol, CSci, FBPsS,  FFPH, FRSBiol, Chartered FCIPD

Jim McManus is Director of Public Health for Hertfordshire and Vice-President of the Association of Directors of Public Health.

He is a Chartered Psychologist, British Psychological Society Fellow, Registered Public Health Specialist and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Jim Chaired the national Whole Systems Obesity Programme and also was one of the leads on the National SLI programme for Suicide Prevention.  His County Council has had a series of five invited external LGA peer challenges including on Public Health, and a Corporate Peer Challenge as part of its Sector Led Improvement and Quality programme.

He is a Visiting Professor at both the London School of Economics and the University of Hertfordshire. Jim is a Health Foundation Generation Q Quality Improvement Fellow and has worked in Quality Improvement for some years, including authoring a chapter on Quality Improvement in Community Safety in a British Quality Foundation book.

Jim has been Director of Public Health at Hertfordshire County Council since 2012. He was Joint Director of Public Health for Birmingham from 2008 till 2012.

In 2010 he was awarded the Good Samaritan Medal for Excellence in Healthcare by Pope Benedict XVI, the highest honour for healthcare work the Vatican can award. Previous recipients include Sir Alexander Fleming.

Sara Blackmore

Sara worked in NHS commissioning and public health roles for 10 years prior to joining the Public Health Specialty Registrar training programme. Sara has worked at South Gloucestershire Council since 2013 as a Consultant and then as Deputy Director of Public Health.  Sara has been Director of Public Health for South Gloucestershire since 2017.  Sara works to embed public health and prevention principles and approaches across the council and with partners across the health and care system. 

1215

Morning Plenary

Nicky Hawkins

Nicky Hawkins is the Senior Communications Strategist and UK Lead for the FrameWorks Institute where she specialised in applying communications science in practice. Having spent 15 years delivering communications and campaigns in the not-for-profit sector, Nicky now helps a wide range of organisations to change hearts and minds on some of the most pressing issues of our time. Nicky works with a wide range of partners across UK civil society. She delivers regular talks and workshops, writes for media outlets including The Guardian, and is passionate about effective, evidence-based communications.

Selena Gray

Professor Selena Gray BSc, MBChB, MD, FRCP, FFPH

Selena Gray is Professor of Public Health at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Until 2018 she combined this role that with that of Deputy Postgraduate Dean in Health Education England where she was a champion of public health and academic training. She has research interests in the area of spatial planning and health, the interaction with the built and green environment and physical activity in older people. She has had a long standing commitment to developing standards in public health, having previously been Registrar of the Faculty of Public Health, a Board Member of UKPHR and currently the Chair of the Board of Accreditation of APHEA, the Agency for Public Health Education Accreditation.

She was Joint Editor of the Journal of Public Health from 2007-2014, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Transport and Health from its inception until 2018. In 2017 she was appointed as Chair of the West of England Nature Partnership,

She is currently the South West Local Board Member for the Faculty of Public Health.

1415

Afternoon plenary

Richard Bolden

Richard is Professor of Leadership and Management at Bristol Business School, University of the West of England. His teaching and research explore the interface between individual and collective approaches to leadership and leadership development. He has published on topics including distributed, shared and systems leadership; leadership paradoxes and complexity; cross-cultural leadership; and leadership and change in healthcare and higher education. He is Director of Bristol Leadership and Change Centre and Associate Editor of the journal Leadership.

Debbie Stark

Debbie is the Deputy Centre Director for PHE in the South West and Deputy Director for Healthcare Public Health. Her department includes Screening and Immunisation, Dental Public Health, Health and Justice and Sexual Health. Her team work closely with NHS England and colleagues commissioning NHS services in Local Authorities.

She was previously the Director of Public Health for Torbay. This was initially a joint appointment between the NHS (Torbay Care Trust) and the local authority (Torbay Council) and she was a member of the management team for each organisation. She transferred to the Local Authority fully in April 2013 and added Community Safety, Environmental Health and Emergency Planning to her list of director responsibilities. Debbie was a member of the national group led by ADPH and LGA on Public Health finances and chair of the South West Sexual Health Board.

Debbie is a specialist consultant in Public Health and a fellow of the Faculty of Public Health. She has a Masters degree in public health but originally trained as an accountant (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants). She is a non-medical consultant and was the first specialist consultant via portfolio in the South West.

 Workshop leaders

1100

1A

Sarah Webb Phillips

Sarah Webb Phillips is a Senior Public Health Analyst at South Gloucestershire Council.  Sarah has been working in public health intelligence for over ten years, starting as a trainee at the then South West Public Health Observatory before becoming the lone analyst in South Gloucestershire and now the senior analyst of their small but ambitious analytical team.  Looking beneath the surface of data, encouraging others to look at analysis and intelligence with a public health lens, and highlighting within-area inequalities have been ever present dimensions to her public health analytical work.

Helen Bradley

Helen Bradley is a Specialist Health Improvement Practitioner at South Gloucestershire Council within the area of Health Inequalities. Helen has worked in Community Development and Youth Work for most of her career before moving to Public Health. Helens focus is the wider determinants of health, working with the community and wider organisations to reduce health inequalities. 

Lynn Gibbons

Lynn is a Consultant in Public Health at South Gloucestershire Council, and her portfolio includes mental health, Children and Young People, the built and natural environment, the wider determinants of health and inequalities. Lynn’s background in the natural sciences and sustainable development has provided a foundation for her interest in upstream public health, in particular the impact of inequalities on the wider determinants of health. 

1B

Sarah Weld 

Sarah Weld is a Public Health Consultant at South Gloucestershire Council where she is the lead Consultant for adult healthy lifestyles (smoking, alcohol, healthy weight, nutrition, physical activity). Sarah is also chair of the Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire STP Prevention Expert Advisory Group. Sarah is passionate about enabling people from across organisational boundaries to find common ground and work together on system wide issues in an effective way. She has over 20 years’ experience of working in health and service improvement in partnership with local communities and the voluntary and community sector. She has led the development health improvement programmes at a local, regional and national level including Health Trainers, IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) services, Community Navigators and most recently development of the South Gloucestershire One You integrated healthy lifestyles and wellbeing service.

Julie Close

Julie Close is the chief executive of Southern Brooks Community Partnership a voluntary sector charity in South Gloucestershire. Since joining the organisation 21 years ago, Julie has increased turnover from £25k to over £1 million with services being delivered through local community hubs for families, older people, children and young people and community groups. 

Julie represents the voluntary sector on several senior officer groups within South Gloucestershire including the Compact, the Safer and Stronger Communities Partnership and Senior Officer Group that supports this, and South Gloucestershire Equalities Forum.

Julie is a skilled and competent facilitator who regularly facilitates mediation meetings in the community and brings together key partnerships to respond to development opportunities.  Julie is committed to working in partnership, providing opportunities particularly for young people that build aspirations and to implementing the values of social justice that underpin the work of Southern Brooks.

Rob Stirzaker

Rob Stirzaker works for South Gloucestershire Council’s Public Health and Wellbeing Division as the programme lead for the One You South Gloucestershire service which mobilised in April this year.  With over 25 years of experience in sports development, leisure facility operations and facility and contract management, Rob is passionate about using a partnership approach and has recently secured significant funding for projects aimed at getting more people to move more!  This approach has been key in securing funding from Sport England for the innovative SportsPound project, and most recently the collaboration with Southern Brooks Community Partnerships created ‘Active in Life ‘, a ground-breaking signposting project unlocking the barriers facing those who are on low income, inactive and in employment. 

1C

Emma Bird

Emma is a Senior Lecturer in Public Health at UWE, Bristol. She leads and teaches on the Health Promotion module on the MSc Public Health programme, and the Principles of Evidence Based Public Health module on the Specialist Community Public Health Nursing programme. Emma is research active, conducting and supervising research on a range public health topics. Her personal research interests are focused on developing and evaluating public health interventions that promote health behaviour change. Her research takes a socio-ecological approach in exploring the individual-, social-, and environmental-level factors that influence the health and health behaviours of a range of population groups in a variety of settings. She is experienced in the utilisation of quantitative, qualitative, and evidence synthesis methods, and is co-author of the textbook Research Methods for Public Health published by Sage.

1D

Mia Moilanen

Before joining PHE in 2015, Mia worked in both analyst and commissioning roles in local authority. She now leads on the knowledge mobilisation work stream in the South West Local Knowledge and Intelligence Service. A core part of the current role is running workshops and training on health intelligence products as well as webinars. Mia’s professional interests lie not only on data and its uses but also on the social determinants of health and health inequalities – she has completed two masters degrees, first one in Social Research and Evaluation and the latest one in Health and Society: Social epidemiology at UCL which focussed heavily on researching health inequalities.

Filiz-Altinoluk-Davis 

Filiz is currently on secondment as a Health & Wellbeing Programme Manager for PHE South West Centre, leading on the CVD prevention and obesity/healthy weight programmes for the South West. Filiz has worked in a range of public health settings in the South West, including Public Health England, NHS England and local authority. Filiz completed her Masters in Public Health in 2017. In another life, Filiz was an archaeologist and Morris dancer.

1E

Kate Mountain

Kate Mountain in a Public Health Specialist at Wiltshire Council with the lead for healthy weight programmes. Kate began at the council as a member of the health trainer programme before progressing to become the service lead. Kate has been fundamental in the development and expansion of the health trainer programme delivered by offenders at HMP Erlestoke, Wiltshire.

Rachel Kent

Rachel Kent is a Public Health Consultant at Wiltshire Council (and Chartered Environmental Health Practitioner) responsible for the wider determinants of health. She started her career as an environmental health officer, later specialising in air quality and pollution control. Rachel then moved into public health as a specialist for wider determinates of health and is now the strategic lead for justice health, suicide prevention, air quality, fuel poverty, built environment and reducing inequalities in health. 

2A

Professor David Evans

David Evans FFPH DPhil

David is Professor in Health Services Research at the University of the West of England. His interests focus on public health leadership, public health workforce development, the history of public health and public involvement in public health. He is the Specialty Tutor for UWE for the South West Public Health Training Programme and teaches on the UWE MSc Public Health where he leads the module Leadership for Public Health. David is on the Board of the UK Public Health Register.  Prior to joining UWE Bristol, David was one of the first English directors of public health from a background other than medicine.

Charlotte Bigland

Charlotte is a Public Health Specialty Registrar training in the South West.  She has completed placements in Wiltshire County Council, Gloucestershire County Council, the Health Protection Team in the Public Health England South West Centre and also Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.  She is currently on a research placement at the University of the West of England focusing on systems leadership in Public Health.  Prior to joining Public Health training, she worked as a medical doctor in both Trinidad and the UK, and as an international investment banker based in London. 

2B

Aimee Stimpson

National Lead, Healthy Places, Priorities and Programmes Division, Health Improvement Directorate, Public Health England (PHE)

Aimee joined the Public Health ‘family’ in 2008 and has worked in various public health roles in the NHS, local authority and she joined PHE in 2014 where she has worked on regional and national public health programmes across the domains of healthcare public health and health improvement. Aimee now leads the national Healthy Places team which has responsibility for health and planning, housing, transport, NSIPs and the natural environment programmes

Michael Chang

Michael is a Chartered Town Planner and Honorary Member of the UK Faculty of Public Health. Michael has many years of experience and practical knowledge, previously leading the Town and Country Planning Association's Reuniting Health with Planning initiative producing publications on the practice of delivering healthy places through the planning and development process. As Programme Manager at Public Health England he provides expert planning input across a number of topic areas including obesity, mental health, lifecourse and physical activity. As part of his commitment to improve the art and science of public health spatial planning, Michael initiated and co-founded the Health and Wellbeing in Planning Network (@HiPNetworkUK). He is Visiting Fellow at the UK WHO Collaborating Centre for Healthy Urban Environments.

2C

Lizzie Henden

Lizzie Henden is a Senior Public Health Specialist with the Bristol Public Health team. Previously she worked as a Screening and Immunisation Health Inequalities Specialist as part of a service commissioned by NHS England South West Commissioning team and hosted by Virgin Care. One of the aims of this service was to begin to reduce health inequalities by identifying what health inequalities were impacting on screening and immunisation programmes, identifying what works to address this, and to deliver a work programme to strengthen processes that would reduce health inequalities. Lizzie has also worked with a number of communities in her time in Public Health in Bristol, Somerset, South Wales, BaNES and Madagascar. More recently, Lizzie has had an active role with the British Red Cross and the Emergency Response Unit working in the Cyclone Idai response in Mozambique and the population movement in Bangladesh, as part of the Mass Sanitation team.

Anna Brett

I qualified from the University of Wales Institute Cardiff with a BSc (Hons) Environmental Health in 2003 and worked for 10 years as a Chartered Environmental Health Officer (EHO) in Kennet District Council and then Wiltshire Council. As an EHO I specialised in Food Safety, Health & Safety and Infectious Disease Control and later went on to manage a team of officers across North and West Wiltshire. In 2010 I graduated from the University of the West of England, Bristol with a MSc Public Health and in 2013 took up my current post at Bath & North East Somerset Council as Health Protection Manager. I thoroughly enjoy the variety of my role and have a particular passion for screening and immunisations since completing a part time 18 month secondment with NHS England/PHE in 2015/16 . This year I am enjoying a new challenge as my portfolio now also includes the Wider Determinants of Health.

Becky Reynolds

Becky is a Consultant in Public Health at Bath and North East Somerset Council.

2D

Pip Tucker

Pip has been a Public Health Specialist at Somerset County Council for the last five years, with responsibility for assembling and communicating the health and social evidence to help set priorities in health and social care in the county. He previously worked in a similar local authority role in Devon County Council, and as Director of the South West Observatory, again working in evidence to support policy-making. He has also worked as an academic geographer, with research interests in Romania and the Sudan.

2E

Becky MacLean

Becky Maclean is a Consultant in Public Health in Gloucestershire County Council. She has been in Gloucestershire since early 2018, after completing PH training in the South West. As part of a ICS committed to Population Health Management Becky has been involved in the development of PHM in Gloucestershire.

Simon Chant

Simon is a Consultant in Public Health at Devon County Council who leads on Public Health Intelligence and other local partnership work relating to health, care and wellbeing. Through his work he has led on the development of linked data locally, including a risk stratification and linked data model for Exeter and current work to establish linked data and population health processes across Devon. This work has focused on exploring and understanding the relationship between health, community infrastructure, poverty, housing and the built environment.

Malcolm Senior

Malcolm is a South West Local Health Care Record Programme Director at Gloucestershire NHS Foundation Trust.