Speaker Biographies

Alastair Stewart OBE

ITV newsreader Alastair Stewart co-hosts London Tonight, presents ITVs Lunchtime News and The News at 10.30pm. Since joining ITN in 1980 he has presented three general elections and numerous ITV Budget specials.

Alastair has presented US live news coverage from the Challenger space shuttle (1986) and the Lockerbie (1988) disasters, live from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and live coverage for two months inside Saudi Arabia of the Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait (1991) and live from the Iraq War (2003).

Alastair was appointed an OBE in 2006.

Professor Richard M Scheffler PhD

Richard Scheffler is the Distinguished Professor of Health Economics and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds the Chair in Health Care Markets & Consumer Welfare.

He is on the faculty of the Graduate School of Public Health and the Goldman School of Public Policy. Professor Scheffler is the founding Director of the Nicholas C. Petris Center on Health Care Markets and Consumer Welfare. In 2004, he received the Carl A. Taube Award from the American Public Health Association for distinguished contributions to the field of mental health services research.

He has published one hundred and thirty eight papers in refereed journals, and has edited and written six books. His newest book, Is There a Doctor in the House: Market Signals & the Supply Cycle will be published next year by Stanford University Press.

Lord Crisp KCB

Currently, Nigel Crisp is leading an International Task Force on scaling up the training and education of health workers in developing countries as a consultant with the Gates Foundation.

He published a report for the Prime Minister in February 2007 on Global Health Partnerships: the UK contribution to health in developing countries.

Previously, he was Chief Executive of the NHS and Permanent Secretary of the Department of Health from 2000 to 2006.

He joined the NHS in 1986 and has managed mental health and acute services. He was Chief Executive of the Oxford Radcliffe Hospital NHS Trust, one of the country's leading academic centres. He worked in community development and in industry prior to joining the NHS.

He is a Cambridge philosophy graduate, an Honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. He became a member of the House of Lords in 2006.

Christine Hancock

Christine Hancock is Africa & European Director of the Oxford Health Alliance, a UK-based global charity which is confronting the world wide epidemic of chronic disease focusing on the 3 risk factors of smoking, poor diet and lack of exercise which cause the 4 chronic diseases which account for 50% of deaths. Christine is an experienced clinician and manager and advocate in public and voluntary organisations.

Her nursing education was at Kings College Hospital, London and she has held hospital, community and mental health nursing positions, including: Ward Sister in London's National Heart Hospital; Director of Nursing at several of London's largest hospitals before becoming the Chief Executive for the health services for 200,000 people in NE London where she was the first nurse and woman to hold such a post. From 1989 to 2001 Christine was General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing the UK's professional association for nurses with over 350,000 members. She has considerable management, political, and media experience and has just completed a 4 year term as the President of the International Council of Nurses during which she was involved in policy making through WHO and other UN bodies and visited 50 countries looking at healthcare systems. She is an adviser to Doctors.net and involved in a number of international and nursing charities.

Mark Goldring

Mark, who started off as a VSO volunteer teacher in Sarawak in 1979, has been Chief Executive of VSO since 1999. Prior to this he held a number of posts, including that of VSO's Overseas Director, Oxfam's Country Representative in Bangladesh, where he has also worked for UNDP, and Social Development Adviser for DFID in the Pacific.

Mark read law at Oxford and has a Masters degree in Social Policy and Planning in Developing Countries from LSE.

His interests include cycling, and he is a Board member of the Accenture Development Partnerships, which seeks to make Accenture's management consultancy services available to organisations involved in international development. Mark served as Chair of the Board of Revolving Doors, an agency that works with people with mental health problems who are in contact with the criminal justice system, until September 2005.

He is married to Rachel Carnegie and has two children.

Roger Stubbs

Roger was Deputy Managing Director of MORI for more than 20 years and is Head of the Business Practice in Ipsos MORI. Most of his career has revolved around professional and business-to-business research. He has directed hundreds of studies for a range of organisations, including a great many for BUPA.

Roger is a member of ESOMAR (the World Association of Research Professionals), a full member of the MRS and a Chartered Statistician. He was the first chair of MORI's Social Research Institute, its ISO Quality systems, MORI Telephone Surveys (for 10 years) and the Research Methods Unit. He is a writer and speaker on research matters; his latest publication, "Cluster Sampling - a false economy?", co-authored with Andrew Zelin in the International Journal of Market Research, was nominated for two awards and won the Silver Medal Award for "Best Paper of 2005". Another recent speech was to the Investor Relations Society's annual conference, 2006. He spoke at a series of symposia set up by BUPA in the 1980s on The Management of Health.