MedicsVoices

A Lifetime Commitment to Social Justice and Health Care Access. Carol Herbert is Professor Emerita of Family Medicine at Western University (London, Canada), and Professor Emerita of Family Practice at UBC (Vancouver, Canada). Past Chair of the University Board of Trustees for the American University of the Caribbean and a member of the Board of Governors of Simon Fraser University.  She served as Dean, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at The University of Western Ontario (1999-2010) and was Royal Canadian Legion Professor and Head of the UBC Department of Family Practice (1988-98).  At UBC, she was founding Head of the Division of Behavioural Medicine and a co-founder of the UBC Institute of Health Promotion Research.  She is former Editor of the international journal, Patient Education and Counseling. Dr. Herbert is a UBC graduate in Honours Biochemistry and in Medicine. She was a full-service community-based family physician and clinical instructor at the REACH community health centre, a UBC teaching facility in Vancouver, from 1971 until 1982 when she joined the full-time faculty in the UBC Department of Family Practice.

Liz Darlinson is a Consultant Nurse and the CEO of Mesothelioma UK, a national charity dedicated to supporting people living with, or supporting those with, mesothelioma and advancing research in this field. In 2004, Liz founded Mesothelioma UK. Mesothelioma UK | Supporting people with this asbestos cancer. She was appointed MBE in the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours, and became Deputy Lieutenant for Leicestershire in 2024, in recognition of her professional contributions to the community.She combines over 40 years of hands-on clinical practice with charity management, education, and clinical research to improve patient outcomes and raise public awareness of this rare, devastating disease. A Consultant Nurse in the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, she also holds an Honorary Senior Lecturer position at De Montfort University, the University of Leicester. She is a founding member of the International Thoracic Oncology Nurses Forum, a lifetime honorary member of Lung Cancer Nursing UK, and the first nursing board member of the International Mesothelioma Interest Group.

Professor Sir Aziz Sheikh OBE is Nuffield Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences and Head of the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford. He is Professorial Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford and Honorary Consultant with the UK Health Security Agency and Public Health Scotland.Aziz was previously Chair of Primary Care Research and Development, Director of the Usher Institute and Dean of Data at the University of Edinburgh. He has played important advisory roles to a number of governments, inter-governmental bodies, including the World Bank, World Health Organization and the World Innovation Summit for Health, and leading scientific bodies including the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society.Aziz has worked for over 20 years on digitising health systems, securely linking health and cross-sectoral data and then using these data to inform and influence health policy, improve the safety and quality of care, and develop personalised risk assessments. He is a fellow of 10 learned societies and he has been awarded numerous UK and international awards for his work. Aziz was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for ‘Services to Medicine and Health Care’ in 2014 and a Knight Bachelor in 2022 for ‘Services to COVID-19 Research and Policy

Professor Philip Evans FRCGP is an academic GP and was for 31 years a GP partner in St Leonard’s Practice, Exeter. He has a long-standing research interest in relational continuity of care in general practice, as well as prediabetes/ type 2 diabetes and more recently primary care genomics.He is currently National Associate Director of Health and Care Research in the NIHR Research Delivery Network (RDN) and was previously the NIHR CRN National Specialty Lead for Primary Care. During the COVID-19 pandemic he was Deputy Chair of the NIHR Urgent Public Health (UPH) Group and has recently led the CRN engagement with the four-nation PRINCIPLE and PANORAMIC studies of community-based treatment of COVID-19. He has over 28 years’ experience of leading primary care research networks, both locally and nationally. For the last four years he has been leading the NIHR CRN Primary care Research Strategy.

Andrew is a GP, educator, and an academic in Oxford.  He has been the Deputy Editor of the British Journal of General Practice since 2022. He co-edited the BMA medical book award-winning Handbook of Primary Care Ethics (CRC press) and BMA Highly Commended Marketization, Health and Ethics (Routledge) in 2018, and has written undergraduate text books on clinical skills, child health as well as ethics and sociology for medical students. He is the co-convenor of the Society of Apothecaries’ diploma examination in philosophy. He volunteers with several local initiatives including the Oxford University Hospitals Ethical Advisory Group and the Magdalen College School medical careers programme. He is the proud father of two amazing little girls and tweets in his own capacity on X and BlueSky as @gentlemedic. 

Minna Johansson is a general practitioner working clinically at Herrestads healthcare centre a healthcare centre in Uddevalla, a small town on the Swedish west coast. She is an Associate Professor at Gothenburg University, director of Cochrane Sustainable Healthcare.She is the lead investigator of the Global Center for Sustainable Healthcare, focused on finding novel ways to make healthcare more sustainable for patients, clinicians, health systems, societies, and for our planet. Minna feels just as passionate about her clinical work as she does about her research. “My goal is to contribute to a more sustainable healthcare through research inspired by the problems me and my patients face in clinical practice.”Her PhD in 2018 was titled "Evaluating benefits and harms of screening - the streetlight effect?". Her research interests include methodological aspects of evaluating benefits and harms of screening when up-to-date data from randomized trials is lacking, informed choice/shared decision making, overdiagnosis/medicalization and how values and context can be integrated in evidence-based medicine.

MaryAnn Ferreux is the Chief Medical Officer for Health Innovation Kent Surrey Sussex and a Non-Executive Director for Kent and Medway NHS Partnership Trust.She has 20 years clinical experience working across both the Australian and UK health system, with specialist qualifications in health system leadership, management, and population health. She has held Board level roles as a medical leader in both primary and secondary care and is passionate about using digital and innovation to improve the patient experience for underserved communities, deliver better integration, and ensure equitable access to care. She is a thought leader for health equity in innovation and is leading on several projects to explore gender and racial bias in AI, debias policymaking and increase women in leadership for digital and technology. She has a special interest in researching health equity and the impact of the social determinants of health. She is leading several initiatives to promote equity, diversity and inclusion in medicine and is a Trustee and Chair of the Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh) EDI Committee.

Louise Dubras, Professor Emeritus, led the creation of a new GP focused Graduate Entry Medical School, at Ulster University. She joined Ulster University as Foundation Dean of the new medical school in 2018, developed the curriculum, put together the educational team, and the first cohort of medical students graduated in 2025. During this time she continued to work as a general practitioner one day each week, and immersed herself in the local community. She was born and grew up in Jersey in the Channel Islands. She was lead GP for a homeless service. addiction and mental illness in Southampton where her increasing involvement with the University of Southampton led to her running the medical degree programme. She became Deputy Dean of Medical Education King’s College GKT homas’s medical school in London at a time of huge curriculum change and later became Interim Dean of Medical Education. She was recognised by the award of MBE in the King's Birthday Honours in 2025.

Dr. Viviana Martinez-Bianchi is a distinguished family physician and a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians. She serves as an Associate Professor and the Director for Community Engagement at Duke University’s Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. In October 2023, she was elected President-Elect of the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA) and assumed the presidency on September 20, 2025 until November 2027.

Dr. Christopher Labos is a cardiologist, a course lecturer in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University and an affiliate member of the Department of Global and Public Health. He is a columnist with the Montreal Gazette and Medscape, featured on the Sunday Morning House Call on CJAD radio, and has a regular TV segment with CTV Montreal and CBC Morning Live. He blogs and produces a video series called “On Second Thought” for Medscape. He is an associate with the McGill Office of Science and Society and hosts the award-winning podcast “The Body of Evidence.” He is the author of “Does Coffee Cause Cancer?” a story about food epidemiology and why food headlines are usually wrong. He realizes that half of his research findings will be disproved in five years: he just doesn’t know which half. Occasionally, he finds time to practice as a cardiologist so he can buy groceries. To date no one has offered him his own primetime TV show.

Professor Erwin Loh MBBS, LBB(Hons), MBA, MHSM, PhD, FRACMA, FACLM, FAICD is President of the Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators. He was most recently National Director of Medical Services for Calvary Health Care. He was previously Group Chief Medical Officer at St Vincent’s Health Australia, Chief Medical Officer at Goulburn Valley Health and Chief Medical Officer of Monash Health. He has qualifications in medicine, law and management. He is a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria and High Court of Australia. He has adjunct professorial appointments at Monash University, University of Melbourne and Macquarie University. He has been an invited speaker at local and international conferences, and has published books, book chapters and journal articles on health leadership, health law, clinical governance, AI and health technology. He is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists. He received the Distinguished Fellow Award from RACMA in 2017 for “commitment to governance, research and publication”.

Carolyn Chew-Graham is a General Practitioner and Professor of General Practice Research at Keele University. Her areas of interest and expertise include the primary care (including in prisons) management of people with mental health problems, multiple health conditions and unexplained symptoms, and the mental health and wellbeing of clinicians.Patient and Public Involvement is key to all her research. She chairs the RCGP ‘Research Paper of the Year’ panel. Carolyn was awarded an OBE for services to general practice and primary care research, including research into Long Covid, in the King’s Inaugural Birthday Honours List, June 2023. Carolyn is an NIHR Senior Investigator.

Jeannie Haggerty is a professor in the Department of Family Medicine of McGill University in Montreal and first holder the McGill Research Chair in Family and Community Medicine Research, based at St. Mary’s Hospital Centre. Trained in Epidemiology & Biostatistics, she is a health services researcher whose domain of research is the factors related to continuity, accessibility and quality of primary care. She has developed and validated measures of the patient experience of patient-centered health care, access and continuity, and how these measures relate to changes in organizational and professional practices. In recent years she has focused more particularly on socially vulnerable populations.  She was recognized as 2018 Researcher of the Year by the College of Family Physicians of Canada.She was president of the North American Primary Care Research Group (NAPCRG, 2008-2010), the founding Scientific Director of the Quebec Knowledge Network in Integrated Primary Health Care (Réseau-1 Québec 2013-2017), and Scientific Director of the McGill Primary Care Practice Based Research network (2016-2024). She has been active in engaging patients as partners in researcher and quality improvement.

Dr Jean-Frédéric Levesque is the Chief Executive of the NSW Agency for Clinical Innovation, and the Deputy Secretary, Clinical Innovation and Research at the NSW Ministry of Health.  Jean-Frédéric is an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity at the University of New South Wales. He has authored more than 160 peer reviewed publications and his seminal research on healthcare access and inequity has been cited more than 3,000 times.   Jean-Frédéric Levesque has a Medical Degree, a Masters in Community Health and a Doctorate in Public Health from the Université de Montréal, Canada. He brings extensive leadership in healthcare systems analysis and improvement, combining experience in clinical practice in refugee health and tropical medicine, in clinical governance and in academic research.  

William (Bill) Ventres, MD, MA is a family physician and medical educator. He spent more than 25 years as a community-based family doctor working in both ambulatory and hospital settings, focusing on the care of underserved and minority populations in safety-net clinics and correctional health settings. He taught medical students throughout his clinical career and was a community-based academic until 2017, when he joined the faculty in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock.Bill contributed greatly to development of global family medicine, physician-patient communication, cross-cultural practice, and the use of qualitative methods in generalist research. A member of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine since 1988 he has been closely associated with the STFM Annual Conference as a presenter, mentor, Foundation Trustee, Editorial Board member, and colleague. He retired from UAMS in 2023 as the Ben Saltzman, MD, Distinguished Chair of Rural Family Medicine in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine. He currently lives in San Salvador, El Salvador, where he is enrolled as a doctoral student in Latin American Philosophy at the José Simeón Cañas University of Central America.

Professor Igor Švab. First Head of the Department of Family Medicine and current Dean of the Medical Faculty, University of Ljubljana. He graduated in 1981, Masters in 1988, and PhD in 1991 at the University of Ljubljana. President of the European Association of Family Physicians WONCA Europe 2004-2010.  He is coordinator of national and international research projects and World Bank projects in the field of family medicine. Editor-in-chief of the Slovenian Journal of Public Health, Editor of the European Journal of General Practice,  Member of Slovenian and Croatian Academy of Medical Sciences, honorary member of the Royal College of General Practitioners (UK) and recipient of the title of WONCA World Fellow. He published more than 100 scientific and professional articles in MEDLINE.

Suzanne Strasberg is a Canadian primary care clinician with extensive experience in national medical leadership and board governance.Dr Suzanne Strasberg was chair of board of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA) and previously served as board chair for MD Financial Holdings Inc. a post she held for four years, has served as a board member with the CMA, and as board chair, board director and president of the Ontario Medical Association. She was a founding member of the Coalition of Family Physicians of Ontario.She was a family doctor in Toronto as a member of the Jane Finch Family Health Team. Her clinical interests include pediatrics, adolescent medicine, gynecology and palliative care.  She was provincial primary care lead at Cancer Care Ontario from 2012 to 2018. She qualified in medicine from the University of Toronto and ICD.D from the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto

Richard Hobbs is a Pro-Vice-Chancellor (without portfolio) at the University of Oxford, where he holds the inaugural PCRT Mercian Chair in Primary Care (2022-) Previously the inaugural Nuffield Professor of Primary Care (2011-22) at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences (2011-2024), he remains Director of the Oxford Institute of Digital Health (2020-) and is Lead for Global Partnerships for Oxford Primary Care. He delivered 42 years of service to the NHS as a doctor, 38 years committed to a disadvantaged and challenging inner-city practice until 2019, and 34 years of leadership and excellence as a clinical scientist focussed mainly upon primary care, clinical epidemiology, and vascular disease.He is one of the world’s foremost primary care academics and has held many national and international leadership roles, leading the development of two of Europe’s most highly rated centres for academic primary care, firstly at Birmingham and since 2011 at Oxford, now one of the largest and most successful centres for academic primary care in the world. He has made major contributions to growing primary care academic capacity, in terms of people development and research networks. He was the fifth recipient of the RCGP Discovery Prize in 2018 (occasional awards since 1953) and was awarded a CBE for services to medical research in 2018 in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List.   He has an outstanding track record in cardiovascular disease research, delivering trials that changed international guidelines and practice, especially in the areas of stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation (BAFTA, SAFE, and SMART trials), heart failure burden and diagnosis (ECHOES and REFER trials), and hypertension self-management (TASMINH 1-5).He made many non-remunerated contributions to educational charitable boards, serving as trustee on some 7 learned societies and universities. Within universities, he has led several major change initiatives and the associated people management within Oxford University.  He also leads a new Institute of Applied Digital Science at Oxford.At the onset of COVID-19 he re-tasked much of his research to urgent COVID studies and is co-Chief Investigator of all the UK National Urgent Public Health Priority Studies in primary care, namely the national repurposed therapies platform trial (PRINCIPLE), national COVID Surveillance (Oxford-RCGP RSC), the national PC diagnostics platform trial (RAPTOR/CONDOR), and the national COVID novel anti-viral platform trial (PANORAMIC). Several papers during Covid ranked top 10 in the world for downloads by SSRN, who also list him as a ‘highly cited global researcher’.He has authored over 600 peer reviewed publications, has an h-index of 121, i10-index of 498, with >140,000 citations (>60,000 since 2019), with 136 papers with >100 citations, 20 papers >1000, and 15 papers >2000. 

Professor Emeritus Trinity College Dublin, Tom O’Dowd was appointed Professor of General Practice in 1993 and continues as a practising GP in West Tallaght, Dublin. After general practice vocational training in Ireland, Tom joined the University of Wales College of Medicine (1980 – 86) as a lecturer and subsequently the University of Nottingham (1986 – 1993 as a senior lecturer. He has been involved in curriculum change and design and postgraduate research supervision. He was Chairman of the Education Committee of the Medical Council that led to the current professionalisation of medical education in Ireland.

Florian Stigler is GP and researcher with a passion for making Evidence-Based Family Medicine exciting and easy to understand. He trained in Styria/Austria with postgraduate studies in the UK in Manchester (MPH) and London (DrPH). He works as a GP with focus on preventive medicine. He has a passion for new projects and created “Golden Nuggets of Family Medicine” – newsletter for busy GPs to provide exciting, practical, evidence-based and short insights. For free and without industry funding. He has been involved several professional organisations (AMSA, IFMSA, JAMÖ, WFPHA).