Keynote Speaker

Biography

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.