John Craig
Chief Executive 

John joined Care City as Chief Executive in October 2016. Over the last two years, John has established Care City as a key player in the East London health and care system. He has continued to develop the programme of work, securing funding for the rollout of successful innovations and maintains a relentless focus on the two founding programme priorities of the Wave 1 Test Bed and NHS Healthy New Town at Barking Riverside. 

Prior to joining Care City, John spent five years leading Innovation Unit, an independent non-profit that develops radically better, low-cost public services. Through his leadership, the organisation grew to thirty staff and extended to have international reach. Before his time at Innovation Unit, John worked as a Policy Advisor at the Cabinet Office and at the think-tank, Demos as a senior researcher.

Hannah Harniess
Head of Projects

Hannah has recently joined Care City as Head of Projects. She is interested in the social determinants of health and a cross-sector approach to population health as well as the potential of technology to transform health outcomes. She has an MSc in Social Epidemiology from the London School of Economics and also completed a Darzi Fellowship 2015-16, from which she obtained a PG Cert in Leadership in Health from the University of Leeds.  

Hannah joined the NHS in 2002 as a Physiotherapist and worked clinically across North East London, leading on numerous service improvement and QI projects. However, most recently she was Programme Director for the DigitalHealth.London Accelerator Programme. In this role, she was responsible for delivering an in-depth programme of support to high-potential digital health companies in order to speed up the spread and adoption of digital technology in the health and care system. Hannah worked with NHS organisations across London, providing leadership in digital innovation as well as working closely with City Hall, NHSE and the Arm’s Length Bodies on wider system changes needed to facilitate innovation in the public sector. The role also involved collaborations with academic partners to evaluate the impact of digital innovation. Whilst at the Accelerator, Hannah also worked as Programme Director for Technology at the Health Innovation Network. Her most recent output in this role was to lead a pan-London Digital Outpatients collaborative on behalf of NHSI, supporting 16 London Trusts to implement digital health projects. 

Outside of work, Hannah enjoys running, travel and keeping up with her three growing children.

Lindsey Carter
Senior Administrator

Lindsey joined the team in January 2015 and is responsible for supporting all areas of Care City administration, including all operational areas and management of day to day running of the organisation.

Lindsey has previously worked for KPMG, Hammonds Law Firm and Relate and has now moved to support the development of Care City due to her interest in Health, Social Care and community development.

Lindsey has a love for learning, walking, socialising and fashion.  She enjoys spending time with her children and family, seeking new adventures.

Rachel Fuller
Communications Lead

Rachel joined the Care City team as Communications Lead in January 2016. Further to delivering the Care City launch event she identified an opportunity to use her marketing and communications experience to build the Care City brand across the local community and wider health and social care environment, building communication stakeholders and designing the communications strategy for the Test Bed Programme among others. 

Prior to joining Care City, Rachel was Marketing Manager for Bupa International where she was responsible for driving revenue growth and brand awareness via IFA, multinational broker and partner networks and engaging provider networks through effective marketing and communication strategies.

Rachel’s 20 years communications experience has been across many different industries including finance, insurance, civil engineering, education and sport.

Rachel spent a whirlwind year travelling the world – 26 countries in 12 months – but is now very happy simply walking her beloved border collie around Southsea Common where she now resides.

Zella King
Senior Associate

Mary France Jardiel
Project Lead

Since joining the health and social care sector in 2011, she remains passionate in reducing health inequalities, supporting healthy ageing, increasing awareness and implementation of social prescribing and the use of innovative digital solutions.

Mez joined Care City in January 2018 as a Skills for Care Graduate Trainee. She provided project leadership and support to the testing of a digital social prescribing tool in primary care, under the NHSE Wave 1 Test Bed Programme. Following its success, she is leading the rollout of the tool across GP practices in the LB Barking and Dagenham whilst simultaneously working with the innovator to improve the tool based on patient and staff feedback.

Since securing a permanent role at Care City, Mez continues to collaborate with service users, frontline staff and innovators to design and test digital innovations that has the potential to improve of patient care, experience and outcome. Mez holds a BSc in Biomedical Science from Queen Mary, University of London and holds two leadership and management qualifications.

Julie Atkins
Project Lead

Julie is a core member of the Innovation Test Bed Wave 2 Programme Team, focussed on the co-design of new care pathways and workforce development for Expert Carers, Digital Prescribers and Administrator Patient Supporters.

Julie comes to Care City with a wide range of experience in public services. She has worked in the civil service, social services, the voluntary sector, a Community Interest Company and the NHS. In all her work she has strived to ensure that users of the services and their families to have a voice, be listened to and feel valued for their experiences and insights.

Julie has been involved in delivering self-management courses to people with long term conditions, a peer led service for many years across London and for the past 6 years with NELFT.

Julie lives near the sea in Kent, is a trained Feldenkrais teacher, Executive Coach, NELFT Quality Improvement Facilitator and Mentor and is learning to play the saxophone

Beth Carty
Project Lead – Healthy New Towns

Beth graduated Durham University in 2016, with a BA in Combined Honours in Arts. Upon leaving University, she secured a place on the NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme, where she specialised in General Management. Beth undertook a wide variety of roles during her time on the scheme, working in community, acute and private sector settings. Through her exposure to a range of different healthcare environments, Beth found her ‘niche’ and interests predominately lay in community care, transformation, sustainability and public health. 

These interests led her to Care City in 2018, where she acts as a Project Lead. In her role at Care City, Beth provides leadership and support to the ‘Healthy New Towns’ development at Barking Riverside, creating new models of care through partnership working, evidence and innovation. Outside of work, Beth is currently studying for a Post Graduate Diploma in Healthcare Leadership, and (when she has time!) enjoys reading, blogging, spending time with family and friends and fundraising for charity. 

Simran Janjua
Project Lead

Simran joined Care City in October 2017 as a Project Lead for the NHS England Test Bed Programme. Since joining, she has been working with frontline health and social care professionals to design, test and understand the impact of digital innovations in their local systems. 

Simran is a mental health pharmacist by background with experience leading the implementation of a new clinical pharmacy service across both acute and community settings. Most recently Simran completed the Darzi Fellowship in Clinical Leadership programme during which she based at the Health Innovation Network, south London’s Academic Health Science Network. 

Simran is passionate about taking a holistic approach to wellbeing and have recently started yoga and mindfulness classes for women in Barking. When I am not at work I am most likely experimenting in the kitchen, playing with paint or volunteering.  

Haroldas Petkus
Project Lead

Haroldas has recently joined Care City team as Project Lead, looking to support Care City mission of bringing digital innovations to health and care organisations in order to improve the health outcomes for local residents. Prior to that, Haroldas was managing national digital health projects at Royal College of Physicians, contributing to development of standards for the clinical structure and content of patient records as well as a number of initiatives on technology in outpatients and AI use and clinical decision support.

Previously, Haroldas was doing quality improvement work on patient safety across two London NHS Trusts. Originally, Haroldas studied psychology in Lithuania and delivered therapeutic work in a medium-secure mental health service in East London as well as contributed to several audit-based quality improvement programmes across majority of UK mental health organisations.

Nicola Kelly
Administrator

I joined the NHS in 2015 as a hospital receptionist moving on to provide administrative assistance to numerous clinical services. I came to Care City in November 2016 a friendly face to meet and greet everyone.  I provide front of house support.

I manage and organise Care City training rooms. I take all room bookings and deal with the invoicing.

Jenny Shand
Executive Director

Jenny has been with Care City since April 2015, working with stakeholders to develop the strategy and programme of work for the organisation, and securing grants to fund our activities.

Jenny also works and UCLPartners, our local Academic Health Science Partnership, where she supports partners to deliver integrated care, with a particular focus on frailty, services for older people and support for carers. Jenny has a wide experience of healthcare in different contexts - as a researcher, a hospital manager and as a consultant at McKinsey.

She holds a Masters in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and is currently completing a PhD at University College London.

Jenny can be contacted via her email

Prof Martin Utley
Care City Researcher in Residence

Professor Martin Utley is Director of the UCL Clinical Operational Research Unit and Researcher in Residence at Care City. His role at Care City is to help strengthen academic presence in the boroughs it serves. This includes embedding evidence-based interventions, deploying robust but pragmatic evaluation methods and developing Care City's portfolio of research work. Martin is leading the evaluation of the Care City NHS England Innovation Test Bed.

Martin can be contacted via M.Utley@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Sonya Crowe
Improvement Scientist in Residence

Sonya is an Operational Researcher from UCL who joined the Care City team in January to help develop and embed robust approaches to service improvement and to evaluate its Health and Social Care Innovation Test Bed. She will be working with stakeholders across organisational boundaries to identify where, in a system, improvements are needed and using metrics and analysis to support this.

Sonya can be contacted via sonya.crowe@ucl.ac.uk

Laura Gillet
Care City Administrator

Laura joined the Care City team in December 2018 as an administrator, supporting the project team and managing reception and bookings.

Previously working as an apprentice for the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, Laura has an NVQ Level 2 in Business administration. She is excited to face a new role and challenges and is thoroughly looking forward to developing new skills within the Health and Social Sector.