Simon Stevens (healthcare manager)

Simon Stevens (healthcare manager)

Sir Simon Laurence Stevens is the eighth Chief Executive of the National Health Service in England with effect from 1 April 2014. He was said by the Health Service Journal in December 2013 to be the second most powerful person in the English NHS, even before he took up his appointment. As the NHS England CEO, he is directly accountable to Parliament for management of £120 billion of annual NHS funding.

About Simon Stevens (healthcare manager) in brief

Summary Simon Stevens (healthcare manager)Sir Simon Laurence Stevens is the eighth Chief Executive of the National Health Service in England with effect from 1 April 2014. He was said by the Health Service Journal in December 2013 to be the second most powerful person in the English NHS, even before he took up his appointment. As the NHS England CEO, he is directly accountable to Parliament for management of £120 billion of annual NHS funding. He has used the statutory independence of NHS England to speak openly about NHS funding and reform. In January 2019 he welcomed new figures from the Office for National Statistics showing that NHS productivity in England has been rising at 3%, treble the performance of the overall UK economy. According to David Cameron, hiring Stevens to run NHS England was one of the cleverest moves that David Cameron made. In March 2019 it was also announced it would also merge the NHS Improvement England into NHS Improvement, effectively merging it into NHS England. During the General Election campaign the Labour Party said they would not generally comment on the public appointments of public officials, but they stated they have a good relationship with Simon Stevens and respect him ‘” Stevens was knighted by the Queen for services to the NHS in 2012. He is a former Labour councillor for Brixton, in the London Borough of Lambeth 1998–2002. His wife, Maggie, is a public health specialist from New York City. Their son was born on Christmas Day 2003 at St Thomas’ Hospital and their daughter in 2008.

He also served on the boards of various non-profits, including the Minnesota Historical Society; the Minnesota Opera; and the Medicare Rights Center, as well as the King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust. Stevens was paid between £190,000 and £999,000 by NHS England in 2015, but he has opted for a voluntary £20,000 pay cut for each year he has been in charge of the NHS. His aim was to ‘Think like a patient, act like a taxpayer,’ he said in his first speech as NHS England Chief Executive in October 2013. Stevens is a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford at Oxford University, where he was elected president of the Oxford Union. He later received an MBA from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and was a Harkness Fellow at Columbia University, New York. After university Stevens first worked in Guyana, and then from 1988 to 1997 as a healthcare manager in the UK and internationally. In 1997 he was appointed policy adviser to two successive Secretaries of State for Health at the UK Department of Health. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Government’s health policy adviser in the Number 10 Policy Unit to Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. In 2004 he became CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s USD 30 billion Medicare business. In 2005 he became corporate Executive Vice President and president of its global health businesses spanning the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. In 2007 he was a director of Brazil’s largest hospital group AMIL. In 2009 he was made a knight of the Order of the British Empire.