Speakers
Sam Roberts
Panel discussion
Dr Sam Roberts is the chief executive of NICE.
Before joining NICE in February 2022, Sam was the managing director of health and care at Legal and General, a financial services firm. In this role, she had responsibility for identifying promising areas for investment across health and care.
Prior to that, Sam was the first chief executive of the Accelerated Access Collaborative. This is a national umbrella organisation for health innovation, hosted by NHS England and NHS Improvement (NHSEI).
She originally trained as a doctor and practiced medicine in South Africa, the UK, and Australia before undertaking an MBA. She then joined McKinsey and Company, where she worked in a wide range of industries before specialising in healthcare.
After McKinsey, Sam moved into the NHS as a senior manager at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. She was also a director in UCLPartners, an Academic Health Sciences Centre and Network. Last year, she took on the role of director of innovation, research and life sciences at NHSEI.
Over the last 5 years Sam has become involved in research, working with health economic models to inform evidence-based policy at the London School of Economics. She then moved to the University of Oxford where she undertook a DPhil (Doctor of Philosophy).
Lawrence Tallon is the Chief Executive Officer at the MHRA (the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency). Before that, he was the Deputy Chief Executive at Guy's and St Thomas' (GSTT) NHS Foundation Trust, the largest and one of the most prestigious healthcare provider organisations in the UK. He joined GSTT in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, and immediately set to work on securing vital international supplies of medical equipment and PPE for the Trust and the wider UK supply lines.
He led the successful merger of GSTT with the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals in 2021, creating a power-house of cardio-respiratory medicine and research. His role includes oversight of the Trust's multiple major strategic changes programmes. Lawrence also leads the Trust's approach to Innovation and Improvement including the creation of the newly formed Centre for Innovation, Transformation and Improvement (CITI). He also sits on the Board of King's Health Partners Ventures, a limited company to accelerate spin out of Med Tech start-ups.
In the decade prior to joining GSTT, Lawrence worked in a range of strategy and leadership roles in university hospitals in the UK and overseas. He was Director of Strategy, Planning and Performance at University Hospitals Birmingham, Managing Director of the Shelford Group of UK university hospitals and Executive Director of Policy at Hamad Medical Corporation in Qatar, one of the leading academic medical centres in the Middle East.
Lawrence began his career working for the UK Government in Whitehall, as a fast stream civil servant at the Department of Health, before working for the Secretary of State for Health and running the headquarters of the NHS Chief Executive. He worked on a range of high profile national policy issues, gaining cross government exposure to No.10 Downing Street, Her Majesty's Treasury and the Cabinet Office, and becoming a senior civil servant within the Department of Health.
He holds Bachelor's and Master's degrees in History from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and a Master's degree in Global Health Policy from Imperial College London.