Simon Stevens (civil servant)

Simon Stevens is a health manager and politician. His appointment^[1] as chief executive of NHS England with effect from 1 April 2014 was announced in October 2013, succeeding David Nicholson. He was said by the Health Service Journal to be the second most powerful person in the English NHS in December 2013, even though he had not yet taken up his appointment.^[2]

Personal life

Simon Stevens was born in Shard End, Birmingham, England 1966 and educated at St Bartholomew's Comprehensive School, and Balliol College, Oxford. He was president of the Oxford Union. He was in hospital with a hip problem for the best part of a school term when he was seven. His wife, Maggie, who is an American public health specialist, gave birth to their son on Christmas Day 2003 at St Thomas' Hospital.^[3]

Labour Party

He was a Labour councillor for Brixton, in the London Borough of Lambeth 1998–2002.

NHS

From 1988 to 1997 he worked as healthcare manager in the UK and internationally. He started his NHS professional career with a week's work experience as a hospital porter and doing paperwork in a mortuary in Durham. Later, he moved on to be general manager for mental health services at North Tyneside and Northumberland and later group manager of Guy's and St Thomas’ hospitals in London.^[4] In 1997 he was appointed policy adviser to two Secretaries of State for Health (Frank Dobson and Alan Milburn) and from 2001 to 2004 was health policy adviser to Tony Blair. He was closely associated with the development of the NHS Plan 2000.

UnitedHealth

From 2004 to 2006 he was president of UnitedHealth Europe and moved on to be chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement and then president, Global Health, and UnitedHealth Group executive vice president of UnitedHealth Group. In October 2013, the speaker biography of Stevens for a health networking conference read: "His responsibilities include leading UnitedHealth’s strategy for, and engagement with, national health reform, ensuring its businesses are positioned for changes in the market and regulatory environment."^[5]

While in the USA, living in Minnesota, he continued to write articles about the NHS.

Chief executive of NHS England

Stevens has repeatedly said that the traditional system of GP surgeries being totally separate from hospitals is ‘past its use-by date’. He told the Royal College of General Practitioners in October 2014 ‘We need to tear up the design flaw in the 1948 NHS model where family doctors were organised entirely separately from hospital specialists and where patients with chronic health conditions are increasingly passed from pillar to post between different bits of health and social services.’^[6] He was responsible for the Five Year Forward View produced by NHS England in October 2014.

According to Fraser Nelson, hiring Stevens back to run NHS England was one of the cleverest moves that David Cameron has made because he "knows more about NHS problems and market solutions than any man alive".^[7]

Publications

• Reform Strategies For The English NHS Health Affairs 2004
• NHS reform is a risk worth taking Financial Times 2010

References