Thinking outside the box: Infrastructure, operations and workforce

Paul is the Chief Digital Information Officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, where he leads a team of 450 digital and information staff. He has held senior, digital roles in the public and private sector over the last twenty-years including CTO for the NHS in England and Group CIO at Serco.

David Elliott is Northumbria Healthcare Foundation Trusts, Executive Chief Digital Information Officer leading on IT Strategy including the Digital and Data developments across the trust. As part of the executive team and trust board, he brings over 17 years of technology transformation experience spanning the private sector in board level roles from the Energy sector through to hospitality and retail brands.

Paul is Deputy Director of Operations and COIO at Co Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust. He is an Operational Director with over 20 years’ experience in the NHS and has significant experience within the acute hospital sector with experience leading high profile change initiatives in and across multiple NHS organisations. Paul initially entered into the Digital Field in 2022 when he provided operational leadership during the big bang implementation of Oracle Cerner EPR across 8 sites; 2 acute, 1 sub-acute and 5 community. He now chairs the Digital and Clinical Advisory Group and provides operational leadership for the digital strategy across the organisation.

Professor Liz Breen is the current Director of the Digital Health Enterprise Zone, an innovation facility based at the University of Bradford. DHEZ is a nexus for knowledge exchange, partnership development and research supporting Bradford Place and the West Yorkshire health eco-system. Liz is a Professor in Health Service Operations based in the School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences, a Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research Fellow and an Affiliate member of the NIHR Yorkshire & Humber Patient Safety Research Centre.

Liz’s research focuses on improvement and sustainability in service supply chains with a specific interest in pharmaceutical supply chains. Her work aims to better understand the complexity of supply chain systems and learnings within and between supply chains. Projects focusing directly on the pharmaceutical supply chain explore areas such as medicines shortages, medicines optimisation and waste management, digitisation, supply chain risk and patient safety.

Liz has undertaken extensive media engagement discussing the creation and deployment of Covid-19 vaccines within the UK and globally. This work has been cited in Europe, Asia, Africa, North America and South America and Australia and in key media outlets such as The Guardian, Time Magazine and Forbes.