How can we fix the NHS and social care?

With the NHS and social care on emergency support, this panel - comprised of Professor Mike Kelly, University of Cambridge; Thara Raj Director of Population Health and Inequalities at an NHS Trust in Warrington; Dr Geoff Wong from the University of Oxford; and author Emily Kenway - will debate potential ways out of the crisis.

Economic consultant, researcher and writer Hilary Cooper, co-author of After the virus, will chair.

*This event will be live streamed via the Cambridge Festival YouTube channel. Booking is only required if you plan to attend in-person. You can set a reminder for when we go live here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdpmbrIVYX0*

Professor Mike Kelly is Senior Visiting Fellow in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. Between 2005 and 2014 he was the Director of the Centre for Public Health at NICE, where he led the teams producing public health guidelines. He has advised the House of Commons Health Select Committee and been a witness before parliamentary committees on a number of occasions.

Thara Raj is Director of Population Health and Inequalities at Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (WHHT). Prior to coming to the hospital Thara was Director of Public Health for Warrington Borough Council and oversaw the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Geoff Wong studied medicine at Robinson College and went on to train as a General Practitioner (GP). He is currently Associate Professor of Primary Care at the University of Oxford, where his research focuses on using realist research approaches to make sense of complex interventions. He is still a GP and has worked in the NHS for over 30 years.

Emily Kenway is a writer, researcher and former carer. Her second book, 'Who Cares: the hidden crisis of caregiving and how we solve it', was a finalist in the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. She is completing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh.