Improvement Fellows 2019
Find out more about the 2019 Fellows below:
Anup Shah
GP Hertfordshire
Anup Shah is a GP Principal in Hertfordshire. He has an interest and experience in optimising primary care systems; patient safety within systems and human bias in healthcare decision making. Anup is a vocal enthusiast for collaborative models of primary care, which maintain continuity and personalised patient experience.
Ashley Parker
Anaesthetics Registrar Barts Health NHS Trust
Ashley Parker is an anaesthetics registrar in the Barts and The London School of Anaesthesia and is currently based at Barts Health NHS Trust.
His improvement experience has focused on perioperative clinical teams, developing practical tools to enable more effective team work and inter-professional communication. The key themes of all his improvement work have been collaboration and patient safety.
His ambitions as an Improvement Fellow are to learn from the experiences and successes of a whole network of improvers, and to share this knowledge in the workplace to empower colleagues to make meaningful improvement a part of their everyday practice.
Berkin Hack
Core Medical Trainee University College Hospital London
Berkin Hack is a Core Medical Trainee at UCLH. He has interests in academic medicine, global health, leadership and management. He has a Masters in Control of Infectious Diseases and has previously worked abroad in a clinical and research capacity.
He completed Academic Foundation Training in Brighton and subsequently applied to the National Medical Director’s Clinical Fellow Scheme where he spent a year working at Macmillan Cancer Support. During this fellowship, Berkin worked on a broad range of projects in policy, strategy, media and public affairs while gaining a unique and invaluable insight into the role of medical leadership in the third sector.
Cheh Kuan Tai
Gastroenterology trainee Homerton University Hospital
Cheh Kuan Tai is a Gastroenterology trainee in North East Thames, currently undertaking an Out of Programme year as the Gastroenterology/Endoscopy Quality Improvement Fellow in Homerton University Hospital. Cheh’s current focus is on introducing digital solutions in the management of Inflammatory Bowel Disease at Homerton. She previously worked with Bowel Cancer UK and introduced a pilot educational programme to improve bowel cancer screening awareness in South London.
Cheh is keen to learn from other fellows in the programme and apply learning gained from the programme in her improvement work.
Dalia Ludwig
Specialist registrar University College Hospital London
Dalia Ludwig is a specialist registrar, dual accrediting in General Internal Medicine and Rheumatology. She currently based at UCLH but has worked in several trusts across north London during her training. Dalia has developed an interest in patient flow and service redesign and is currently working with the Acute Medicine Team at UCLH developing the new Medical Emergency Assessment Unit to improve patient flow through acute services. She is also developing a patient pathway for managing Large Vessel Vasculitis in conjunction with nuclear medicine and vascular surgery to improve access to diagnostic tools early and manage patients in line with new national guidance. She has successfully implemented a Biologics Treatment Pathway for patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis in London Northwest Hospitals NHS Trust working with specialist pharmacists and commissioners.
Dalia particularly enjoys collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams in and outside of the hospital environment. She hopes the UCLP Improvement Fellows Programme will help her to expand her network of improvers, and collaborate and learn from healthcare professionals from a variety of healthcare backgrounds.
Gabriella Massa
Improvement Advisor UCLPartners
Gabriella Massa is an Improvement Advisor at UCLPartners where she supports the implementation of SIM, the national project for Mental Health, across Bedfordshire and Essex. She is also involved in the training and education offered at UCLPartners, supporting staff within the partnership to increase their improvement capability with skills and knowledge of quality improvement. Prior to start her role as Improvement advisor, Gabriella led the enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) programme in the Head and neck surgical department at UCLH fulfilling the role of Macmillan Clinical Nurse Specialist. She also obtained a practitioner qualification for the Quality, Service, Improvement and Redesign course (QSIR) by the NHS Improvement.
Gabriella hopes the Improvement fellows Programme will enable her to learn from her peers and share skills and experience to drive and implement sustainable projects in her current role at UCLPartners.
Hannah Lark
Patient Safety Improvement Lead University College Hospital London
Hannah Lark is the Patient Safety Improvement Lead at University College London Hospital and a practicing Respiratory Physiotherapist. She completed her physiotherapy training in 2010 at St George’s University of London, before undertaking junior and senior rotations at St Thomas’ Hospital and moving to UCLH as a specialist critical care and surgical physiotherapist. She has always been passionate about a culture of continuous learning and improvement and enjoyed this aspect of her clinical role so much that she moved into a full time improvement role in 2017.
Hannah currently leads on the trust’s improvement initiatives to reduce avoidable harm from unrecognised deterioration and surgical and invasive procedures. Her role involves providing strategic direction on trust wide quality priorities and improvement initiatives to enhance patient safety. She promotes evidence based practice, through co-ordinating, implementing and providing assurances that the trust is keeping up to date with the latest guidelines, policies, procedures and research.
Hannah is passionate about improving patient outcomes through the use of quality improvement methodology. She provides education and supports innovation to motivate frontline staff to drive improvement locally. The UCLP Improvement Fellowship will allow her to develop her improvement skills further through the networking of ideas and support her aim to increase QI capability at UCLH.
Imran Mannan
Consultant Physician and Geriatrician University College Hospital London
Imran Mannan is a Consultant Physician and Geriatrician at UCLH, working across a range of Geriatric Medicine settings including inpatient, liaison and community, together with Acute Medicine. He undertook his higher specialist training in the UCLPartners region and during this time, developed a keen interest in quality improvement, along with education and training. He subsequently completed a clinical leadership (‘Darzi’) fellowship.
Jaleel Mohammed
Specialist Registrar in Forensic Psychiatry HMP Pentonville
Jaleel Mohammed is a Specialist Registrar in Forensic Psychiatry, currently working in the Mental Health In-Reach Team at HMP Pentonville.
Jaleel previously worked in East London NHS Foundation Trust where he was introduced to Quality Improvement science and methodology through their training programme. He has since been involved in quality improvement and audits across multiple NHS Trusts and has presented at international conferences. He has a keen interest in the interface between mental health and the law and is passionate about ensuring offenders with mental illness receive the treatment that they need.
Jaleel’s ambition is to expand the use of improvement science within psychiatric care, particularly within secure psychiatric services, and to develop interdisciplinary working in forensic psychiatric services.
Jennifer Rea
GP Islington
Jennifer Rea is a portfolio GP working in Islington. She currently splits her time between clinical practice and Quality Improvement (QI) work with the Islington Federation, Quality Improvement Support Team (QIST). Her current project involves evaluating the impact of a novel frailty intervention in North Islington that seeks to proactively identify and manage unmet need in community based, moderately frail, older people.
On finishing GP training in London in 2015, Jennifer became an NIHR In-Practice Fellow working in Primary Care research within the Department of Primary Care and Population Sciences, University College London. During this two-year fellowship she completed a Master’s in Public Health at Kings College London and developed her interest in QI.
Jennifer now strives to implement QI methodology day-to-day through her work with the QIST – aiming to drive up quality in primary care practice, reduce inequalities across patient care, improve day-to-day clinical outcomes and improve both patient and staff experience of healthcare in her borough.
Priyal Shah
Senior Commissioning Manager NHS Haringey Clinical Commissioning Group
Priyal Shah is a Senior Commissioning Manager at NHS Haringey Clinical Commissioning Group. She is a registered pharmacist and has over 10 years’ experience in acute healthcare. Priyal has experience in improving services for older people and people living with frailty in the community. Through collaboration across health and social care services, she has led a number of initiatives to improve quality of life and outcomes for individuals, including the development of integrated models of care delivery and enhancing the provision of Advance Care Planning within care homes.
Priyal aspires to promote and progress improvement and transformation across health and social care systems to deliver high quality care for local residents.
Ryan O’Shea
Senior Commissioning Manager Primary Care Southend CCG
Ryan O’Shea has worked in the NHS for over twenty years and began his career within the field of Audiology where he worked at all levels from a student to management. He has worked across Essex and London and specialised in rehabilitation for complex adults. He has represented the profession on national committees, regulating areas such as the standards of new hearing aid technology before it can be used by the NHS; the clinical competencies of the profession itself; and governing the universities that provide the professional training. He has a specialist interest in outcome measures, making this the focus of his MSc research project.
Since completing an MSc in Clinical Health Management in 2017, Ryan has been working in Essex as a CCG commissioner focusing on development and transformation within the primary care setting. This has allowed him to work on some very interesting change projects, and despite the financial difficulties experienced in the local health system he has always ensured the quality of care provided to patients is at the heart of these changes. Quality Improvement has been a passion of Ryan’s for many years and he believes it is vital to the success of the NHS. Like many professionals he was using these skills and tools before he knew it could be called QI and enjoys sharing this knowledge wherever and whenever he can. Ryan has taught, coached and developed QI skills within the acute clinical workforce and primary care workforce, and is always amazed at the difference it can make to patient care and the working day for healthcare staff.
Sandra van Os
Research Associate University College London
Sandra van Os works as a Research Associate in the Department of Applied Health Research (DAHR) at UCL. As an applied health researcher, she aims to provide the robust, empirical evidence upon which sustainable improvement can be built, and to enable that evidence to be translated into local and national decision-making to spread improvement. Her current research aims to develop recommendations to improve primary care safety netting for potential lung cancer symptoms, to reduce diagnostic delays and improve outcomes. She is also involved in a scoping review of ethnographic research methods in healthcare improvement.
Originally from the Netherlands, she enjoyed a career in marketing and communications before retraining in health psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. During her PhD Sandra investigated treatment adherence among young people with haemophilia. To deliver this nationwide mixed methods programme of research she worked with a large multidisciplinary network of collaborators including clinicians, patients, allied health professionals, academics and the national patient charity.
Sandra is looking forward to collaborating with the other Improvement Fellows to learn about improvement from their different perspectives, and applying what she learns in future projects.