Driving improving health and reducing inequalities in Scotland A three-year programme to drive improvements to health and reduce inequalities in Scotland

Chris Creegan has spent his career in the public and third sectors. He has worked in policy, research, and communications, and held several senior leadership roles. Chris was Director of Corporate Affairs and Deputy Director of Qualitative Research at the National Centre for Social Research between 2006 and 2012, and Chief Executive of the Scottish Commission for Learning Disability between 2013 and 2019. He was Chair of the Scottish Association for Mental Health between 2015 and 2022 and has been a non-executive member of the Executive Advisory Body at Social Security Scotland since 2018. Chris was Strategic Advisor and Chair of the Expert Advisory Group for the Health Foundation’s review of the state of health and health inequalities in Scotland, Leave no one behind, published in January 2023.

Adam is currently a Director for Carnegie UK. As part of the Trust’s executive team Adam is responsible for shaping and informing the organisations work across the UK and Ireland as well as developing partnerships to scale and maximise Carnegie UK’s impact. Prior to his current role, Adam was the Head of Nesta in Scotland, the UK’s innovation agency for social good, and before that he was Head of Policy and Communications at Shelter Scotland. Adam was a member of the SCVO Board of Trustees for six years and sat on the Advisory Board for Data Driven Innovation at the University of Edinburgh between 2020 and 2023. Adam was a member of the Steering Committee that helped develop Scotland’s first AI Strategy in 2021 and was a member of the Scottish Government’s Advisory Group for the development of Scotland’s first Digital Health and Care Data Strategy in 2022. 

In his time at Nesta Scotland Adam led work commissioned by the Health Foundation as part of the independent inquiry into health inequalities in Scotland that sought to better understand stakeholder views on issues relating to Scotland’s implementation gap and growing public health inequalities.

Alison has worked at Shelter Scotland since 2002 and became Director of Shelter Scotland in 2020. Previously she was Deputy Director, with responsibility for the leadership and development of its services across Scotland. Alison has a high-profile leadership position in the housing and homelessness sector in Scotland. She has served on the First Minster appointed Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Action Group, established in October 2017 and is part of the Scottish Government’s Homelessness Prevention Strategy Group. Alison recently co-chaired the Scottish Government’s Task and Finish Group on Temporary Accommodation. She is regularly invited to serve on other national strategic/social policy fora and to deliver keynote addresses at national events.  

Some of Alison’s key interests and commitments as Director of Shelter Scotland include: ensuring that it is the lived experience of housing policy and practice failure that defines and drives what we do; structural change in our housing system; advocating for a more systemic use of data and evidence and tackling inequalities; and delivering authentic inclusion.  

Before joining Shelter Scotland, Alison worked for around 15 years in health and social care, mostly in the third sector, but also within local authorities and the NHS. Immediately prior to joining Shelter Scotland, Alison worked in the mental health field, where she played a leading role in pioneering the involvement of people who experience mental health issues in the design, delivery and management of services. Alison began her career in the late 1980s, working in a large hostel for people who had long-term experience of homelessness.  

Derek is the Service Director for Housing and Homelessness at the City of Edinburgh Council.  

He started out his career as a Trainee Trading Standards Officer at the City of Edinburgh Council, with subsequent roles in licensing, community safety, environment management, transformation and family and household support before he left in 2016 to take up the post of Head of Communities and Housing at Aberdeen City Council. 

Following reorganisation, he was appointed as Head of Early Intervention and Community Empowerment for Aberdeen City Council, and was responsible for housing and homelessness, equalities, community safety, community learning and libraries as well as developing early intervention and prevention practice for the council. In this role Derek chaired community planning Aberdeen’s anti-poverty and community justice groups, before returning to Edinburgh in March 2023 to his current post. 

Derek has a strong interest in public health, data, prevention and early intervention practice and anti-poverty work.  

He is a Trustee of the Scottish Professional Football League Trust and a Board member of LandAid Scotland. 

Dona joined NHS Lothian as Director of Public Health and Health Policy on 1 June 2021. 

Prior to joining Lothian as Director of Public Health and Health Policy, Dona was Director of Public Health in Fife, following a six-year period as Deputy Director in Lothian. As Director of Public Health she has responsibility for local public health teams that focus on reducing inequalities through a focus on the determinants of health. 

She has worked in children and young people’s health and education within local authorities, the voluntary sector, Scottish Government, and the NHS.  

Dona is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health and Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Health.  

Her career has taken her to YWCA Scotland as Deputy Director (Scotland) and for 7 years she led the ‘Healthy Respect’ National Demonstration Project. In 2008, Dona was seconded to Scottish Government and led the H1N1 vaccination campaign following a period in sexual health and HIV policy. She has worked as a Consultant in Public Health since 2010. 

Her main interests are reducing inequalities, particularly through work on social determinants, reducing poverty and increasing life chances. She is independent chair of the Scottish Youth Work Research Steering Group. In a voluntary capacity, she is a Trustee with Inspiring Scotland.

Jessica is the Lead Data Scientist at NHS Grampian and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Data Science at the University of Aberdeen. She runs Grampian’s collaboration with the Health Foundation and four other NHS centres across the UK. This is a six-year project working to reduce health inequalities. The team’s specialty is working with big, messy, high-security health and social care data. Jessica’s focus is creating useful analysis for policymakers and care providers.

Richard leads the team at Carers Scotland and Carers NI where he joined in January 2022. He has worked on policy issues and research relating to unpaid carers throughout his career. He has extensive experience working in the third sector in senior leadership roles, including as Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Marie Curie, where he led award winning campaigns to change legislation and influence public policy. He has a track record in managing departments, teams and projects covering public affairs and stakeholder engagement plans, research projects, corporate communications activity, and strategy development. He has worked for a range of organisations including Barnardo’s Scotland, Fleishman-Hillard, NHS Quality Improvement Scotland and the Home Office.  

Richard has a degree in History and Politics, a MSc in Policy Studies, and a Master of Public Health with a focus on carers from the University of Edinburgh. Richard is a member of the Institute of Leadership. 

Rishma Maini qualified in medicine from the University of Edinburgh in 2005 and worked as a junior doctor in Scotland and Australia. During her Public Health specialty training, she worked in various organisations and locations including: NHS Tayside; the UK Health Protection Agency in Colindale; the UK Department for International Development in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); Surrey County Council; and Public Health England’s Global Disaster Risk Reduction team in London.

In 2020, she gained a PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine for her mixed-methods research exploring the motivation and incentives of health workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Rishma also worked for the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office as a health and nutrition adviser in Pakistan, and a senior health adviser within the Africa Regional Department. 

Rishma is currently a Consultant in Public Health Medicine, with a remit of health care public health. She has a dual appointment with Public Health Scotland and NHS Fife, enabling her to credibly influence evidence-based public health policy and practice both nationally and locally. She sees her role as being an effective change agent in improving and innovating in the delivery of health services. Critically, this needs to happen in a responsible way which reduces health inequalities. To this end, she is co-leading a group with Scottish Government which is developing a framework to more systematically identify and address health care inequalities. She is also supporting work within Public Health Scotland on tackling racialised health inequalities, which includes improving the quality of our ethnicity data collection across the health and care system.

Sara has spent her career working in roles with a common aim to bring about change which better protects, respects and fulfils people’s rights and is currently Chief Officer of Development at the Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland. The ALLIANCE is the national third sector intermediary for health and social care, bringing together a diverse range of people and organisations who share in the vision of a Scotland where everyone has a strong voice and enjoys their right to live well with dignity and respect. 

Sara is responsible for shaping the vision of the organisation and developing the strategic direction of the organisation. Central to this is working closely with ALLIANCE members and ensuring a strong voice for disabled people, people living with long term conditions and unpaid carers and opportunity to influence change based on their lived experiences. 

Sara oversees the ALLIANCE’s portfolio of programmes, working collaboratively through innovative partnerships that show how change can be achieved, and promoting the role of the third sector as a key innovator and partner in realising Scotland’s national health and wellbeing outcomes. 

Scott is currently Head of Claims, Underwriting and Product Management for Scottish Widows (part of Lloyds Banking Group) and their protection insurance business. With a wide range of experience across finance, pricing, change and proposition roles, his focus across his career has been on propositions that help customers when some of the worst health outcomes happen.

Working for a nationally focussed group that wants to build the financial and wider resilience to health events, Scott is really keen to support the work of the Health Foundation to look at holistic approaches and actions to close the health inequalities in Scotland.

An employability expert with a passionate belief in good work as part of a healthy life, Susan has championed the need to take a holistic approach to health, inequality and employment throughout her 20 years working in welfare to work.  

Susan began her employability career as an engagement consultant, reaching out to some of Scotland’s most deprived communities. A credible messenger, her own lived experience of growing up in Glasgow gained her the trust of participants and she channelled her empathy into working more impactfully with participants and stakeholders throughout her career.  

Susan is the UK Operations Director for Fedcap, a not-for-profit organisation improving people’s economic wellbeing, and a Fellow of the Institute of Employability Professionals. 

She uses her strong analytical skills and passion for data to implement extensive reporting/insight processes that informs not just internal continuous improvement (eg collaborating with developers to design fit-for-purpose customer record management system deployed across Fedcap’s UK contract footprint) but also changes in commissioner behaviour/policy including influencing senior Government stakeholders to understand the relative impact of health integration into employment services.