The CHFG Team

Martin Bromiley OBE

Martin Bromiley OBE

Airline Captain. CHFG Founder and Trustee

Martin founded the Charity in 2007 with academics, clinicians, leaders and policy makers. He combines his work with the charity while working as an Airline Captain. Martin occasionally speaks at key events and is invited to input to policy development. His work is widely recognised and his many awards include the Royal College of Anaesthetists Medal and Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (ad hom).

Professor Sir Ian Kennedy

Professor Sir Ian Kennedy

Patron, Emeritus Prof. of Health Law, Ethics and Policy at UCL

He gave the Reith Lectures in 1980 (Unmasking Medicine). He chaired the Bristol Royal Infirmary Public Inquiry from 1999 to 2002 and the first NHS regulator, the Healthcare Commission, from 2004 to 2009. Between 2009 and 2016 he chaired the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), created in response to the MPs’ expenses scandal. He is a Doctor of Law, and in 2002 was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He holds Honorary Doctorates in Science, Medicine and Public Policy and is an Honorary Fellow of six Medical Royal Colleges. He was knighted for his services to medical law and ethics in 2002

Professor Chris Frerk

Professor Chris Frerk

CHFG Chair and Trustee

Chris is a consultant anaesthetist in the NHS and an associate member of the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors. He has a longstanding passion for human factors and patient safety working to ensure the inclusion of Human Factors and Ergonomics into national reports and guidelines, engaging with hospitals and national healthcare organisations. He presents at educational events about safety through design, systems and non-technical skills.

He has been a trustee of the Clinical Human Factors Group since 2011, stepping up to the role of chair in 2021.

Catherine Harrison

Catherine Harrison

CHFG Trustee

Catherine’s experience spans policy, communications and strategy, relating to quality, safety and leadership in healthcare. She worked on both national patient safety campaigns in England, Patient Safety First and Sign up to Safety, through which she came to understand human factors principles. She currently has oversight and strategic responsibility for NHS Providers’ priority work supporting NHS Trust boards to lead for improvement, including influencing at a national level. She has a keen interest in exploring what helps to create the conditions for success and in how change really happens in a complex system.

Dr Peter Hambly

Dr Peter Hambly

CHFG Trustee

Peter is an anaesthetist. He recently retired after 25 years as a consultant at Oxford, where he developed an almost messianic belief in the power of Human Factors science to improve the safety and efficiency of  healthcare. He is a writer and campaigner, particularly on the issue of medication error in anaesthesia, and has taught Human Factors to a wide range of healthcare workers over many years. He has several television screenwriting credits to his name, and looks forward to the day that real hospitals achieve the level of reliability so often depicted in fictional ones.

Dr Karen Allum

Dr Karen Allum

CHFG Trustee

Karen Allum is a social scientist and health researcher in the NHS in Scotland.  She has a background in strategic roles in the criminal justice and social care sector for over 30 years. She has a particular interest in organisational transformation and supporting staff wellbeing. 

She gained her doctorate from the University of Dundee where she evaluated the national implementation of the new model of clinical supervision for midwives in Scotland.  Her work has been published in peer reviewed journals and presented at national and international conferences.

Karen is a qualified project manager and has been involved in implementation of new programmes in the NHS.  She brings operational experience of improving safety and staff wellbeing and of working collaboratively with local and national bodies.

Karen is an experienced board member and has worked with organisations requiring statutory regulatory involvement.

Prof Gillian Janes

Prof Gillian Janes

Associate Clinical Fellow Leadership and Quality Improvement, Trustee

Gillian is a nurse academic and a Q Community founding cohort member, who has held senior roles in healthcare practice, education and applied research. Her experience includes primary and secondary care and public health settings, statutory and voluntary sector organisations. Involvement in Human Factors/Ergonomics developed from her quality improvement work and interest in early translational research, exploring how learning from non-healthcare disciplines and other safety-critical industries might be used to improve outcomes for the people using healthcare services and the staff providing them. She joined CHFG as a Trustee in 2022. 

Nikki Fountain

Nikki Fountain

CHFG Trustee

Nikki is a registered Paramedic and works as the Business Manager to the Chief Medical Officer at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust, where he is the lead for their Patient Safety Transformation Programme. Nikki is an Associate Clinical Director for St John Ambulance and has a keen interest in human factors and patient safety and is due to complete his MSc in Human Factors in 2024.

 

Dr Sue Deakin

Dr Sue Deakin

CHFG Trustee

Sue Deakin is a Consultant Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgeon at West Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, she specialises in trauma, paediatric orthopaedics and foot and ankle surgery. Sue is Clinical lead for Human Factors at West Suffolk.  She is Vice President of AO UK and Ireland due to be President in 2 years time and  Member of the British Orthopaedic Association wellbeing Steering Group.

Clare Bowen

Clare Bowen

CHFG Trustee and Treasurer

Clare is a Certified Accountant and Partner at an Accounting Practice, her interest in patient safety came after her daughter died during routine surgery in 2006. Clare has spoken at numerous events to tell her story to highlight the issues faced when human factors are not fully considered. As a lay person on the board of Trustees Clare brings an outside perspective to the Charity as well as her Accounting knowledge.

Dr Ruth O'Dowd

Dr Ruth O'Dowd

CHFG Trustee

Ruth O’Dowd is a Consultant Anaesthetist at North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust, with additional roles for the Trust as Patient Safety Specialist and Clinical lead for digital safety and for end of life care. With longstanding patient safety roles she has developed an interest in application and promotion of a Human Factors and Ergonomics approach both to understand and learn from patient safety events and importantly as an integral part of designing safer healthcare with staff and patients.

Dr Dawn Benson

Dr Dawn Benson

Programme Manager

Dawn is a sociologist who specialises in safety investigation within health, social care, and education.  She spent almost 20 years as an academic researching and teaching at the universities of Northumbria, Aberdeen, and Oxford.  Her work in Human Factors and patient safety was born from personal experience when her first child was birth injured.  She is particularly interested in how we improve services by engaging patient/service user perspective.  She has worked  as a National Investigator at the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB) where she was previously seconded to establish the education function and developed the concept of Investigation Science. 

Rebecca O’Leary

Rebecca O’Leary

Business Manager

Rebecca runs all aspects of the Charity’s business functions, including sales and marketing, events, supporter management, Trustee meetings and all communications. Rebecca brings experience in managing membership organisations and is the glue that enables the charity to act as a conduit, a network hub, and an influencer.