Faculty of Health and Care Conference 2026

Shana Vijayan

Shana Vijayan is the Assistant Director for the Digital Profession at NHS England, where she is responsible for the development of an NHS wide digital and data profession. She has an extensive background in health management, strategy and innovation in complex and varied environments.

She champions a culture which is open and transparent. Her particular interest is in how NHS organisations can be more effective. She is concerned with how public health services are held to account and the tools and technologies that shape healthcare.

Shana is a trustee of The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) based at Bletchley. She is also a trustee of Rosetrees Trust, a charitable foundation that funds cutting edge medical research, and serves as an expert panel member for the Vivensa Foundation, which supports pioneering science and radical social innovation to enable healthy ageing.

She holds a PhD from UCL and is a former Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

James Freed

James Freed leads the NHS Digital Academy, an organisation dedicated to supporting teams in health and care to deliver more value tomorrow than they did today. He was the last Chief Digital and Information Officer for Health Education England and his career has taken him through Cancer Research, Change Management and Standards development. 

In 2017 James was voted by peers as one of the top 100 influencers globally in Health IT as part of the #HIT100 twitter campaign. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, a FedIP accredited Leading Practitioner and a Chartered Health CIO accredited through CHIME. In 2025 James was awarded BAME Ally of the Year across health and care.

Tom Searle

Tom Searle is the CEO and Co-Founder of CogStack, a leading health-tech spinout that utilizes AI and NLP to unlock clinically relevant data for healthcare providers. With a PhD in Clinical NLP and dual roles as an Associate Professor at UCL and Translational Research Director at KCL, they bring a deep expertise in transforming fragmented, complex datasets into actionable insights. Having previously managed global development teams in financial services, Tom combines academic rigour with industrial-scale engineering experience, offering the strategic technical oversight essential for data-driven climate initiatives and organisational scaling.

Helen Thomas

Helen has been the CEO of Digital Health & Care Wales since 2021, leading the organisation’s impressive response to the Covid-19 pandemic, supporting NHSWales to adopt data and digital advances at pace and scale. Helen also led the organisation through its transition to a Special Health Authority on April 1st 2021, with Digital Health and Care Wales continuing to deliver national digital and data services to NHS Wales.

Helen has worked in the NHS for over 30 years, initially working in finance, moving into health information in 2000. She has gained wide health informatics experience across a number of senior roles over the last 20 years, and has spearheaded digital transformation to deliver more effective and safer care. Helen was named Digital NHS CEO of the year in 2021 and has an MSc in Health Informatics from Swansea University. She is a leading practitioner of the Federation of Informatics Professionals, a fellow of the British Computer Society and a Professor of Practice at University of Wales Trinity St David.

In her time as CEO, Helen has made considerable ground in leading DHCW, not just to deliver major digital and data services to NHS partners, but to become a supportive and inclusive organisation and is passionate about being a role model for staff. Helen recognises the importance of supporting communities and ensuring that no one is left behind by digital transformation. As part of her commitment to this, Helen chairs DHCW’s digital inclusion group which looks at how the organisation works with partners to support those who might not have the skills or access to benefit from digital change.

Professor Hatim Abdulhussein