Peoples Advisory Forum members

Sir David Behan – Chair

Sir David Behan was appointed as Chair of NHS Health Education England in December 2018. He provides strategic leadership and ensures proper governance for the Board.

He began his career as a social worker and progressed to be the first Chief Inspector of the Commission for Social Care Inspection in 2003. In 2006 he was appointed to the Department of Health as the Director General for Social Care, Local Government and Care Partnerships working on personalised care, carers learning and disability policy, mental health policy, the reform of social care funding and legislation.

In 2012 he was appointed to the role of Chief Executive of the Care Quality Commission where he led a team to conduct a fundamental review of the quality and safety regulation of health and care in England.

He was awarded a knighthood for services to health and care in the 2017 New Year's Honours list.

Sir David chairs PAF.

Dr Navina Evans MBBS DCH MRCPsych - Chief Executive

Navina has over twenty years of clinical experience in psychiatry, medicine and paediatrics and previously held the positions of Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Operations.

Navina has worked as the Clinical Director for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) at ELFT. She has also been involved in medical education at Barts and The London Medical School as Honorary Senior Lecturer, Associate Dean, and provided pastoral care to medical students.

Navina has considerable experience of working in multidisciplinary roles crossing organisational boundaries. She has worked with local authorities, the voluntary sector, acute and community services, and in primary care. More recently she has taken an active role in the development of local integrated care systems.

Navina is passionate about staff wellbeing and co production with patients, advocating for the best possible care and creating a culture of enjoying work for staff.

Liz Fenton – Deputy Chief Nurse

Liz Fenton (MSc, BSC (Hons), RN, QN) is the Deputy Chief Nurse for the NHS England Workforce Training and Education directorate. Passionate about quality improvement, Liz works with the Care Quality Commission as a Specialist Advisor and is an elected member of the national Community Hospitals Association leadership team. Liz is also a surveyor undertaking national and international peer accreditation, benchmarking services against best practice most recently in Porto and is the chair of the CHKS Accreditation Council.

Liz Fenton is the Deputy SRO for PAF.

Amanda Robson - Senior Nurse

Amanda began working for NHS England in August 2021 as a Senior Nurse in the National Nursing and Midwifery Team and enjoys working with partners on professional nursing issues as well as critical health and social care initiatives.

Kellie Espie-Whitburn - National Stakeholder Relations Manager

Kellie provides stakeholder engagement and support nationally, within the Strategic Relations directorate; focused on bringing about improvement in the consistency and quality of NHS England’s engagement with its key national stakeholders.

Janet Down

Janet became a member of PAF in September 2017. Her previous involvement in public and public voices was when she was a non-executive director of an NHS board and took a special interest in the public interface.

Janet has worked at a Senior level, for the past 24 years in the field of Learning Disability and for 17 years was the CEO of a voluntary organisation which grew to be one of the largest local charities in the Birmingham area.

Janet’s decision to join PAF was due to her passion for good quality health care with the emphasis being on care. Further, her experiences as a mother and a carer for a family member at final years of his life.

She brings with her experience from her background in learning disability, Board level experience having worked as both an executive director and a non-executive director.

Janet lives in Warwickshire.

Anna Gill

Anna is a retired state registered nurse, and her role on PAF is informed by nearly 30 years as the parent of her son who has multiple severe disabilities and a life limiting condition. She has a long history of working nationally as a parent carer and carer representative with different government departments, NHS England (NHSE), Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the Voluntary Sector. She now works as an independent consultant and trainer within the field of children and young people with special educational needs and disability (SEND) and is Vice-Chair of Cambridgeshire Community Services NHS Trust where she leads on Children and Young People's services. Anna received an OBE in 2012 for services to disabled children and their families.

Robert Lowe

Since retiring from his job as a Senior Project Manager for a FTSE 100 company, Robert has taken advantage of his local NHS Trust’s People Participation programme to further the representation of mental health service user and carer perspectives within NHS recruitment, working groups, research programmes and strategic committees. His role on the Patient Advisory Forum is also informed by having a son who is currently in training as a hospital doctor and a daughter in training to become a Mental Health Social Worker.

Priscilla McGuire

Priscilla joined PAF in September 2017. Prior to that she had been a member of the Women's Network and Patient Safety Expert Group at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (RCOG). She is currently a lay ,ember for Patient and Public Involvement at Greater Huddersfield CCG and a lay member for the Joint Committee of Clinical Commissioning Groups for South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw. She is also a lay assessor for the Royal College of Physicians. Her professional background includes: Ofsted Inspector; Education/Training Consultant; lecturer/manager in FE/HE; and writer/researcher.

Priscilla decided to join PAF because it offers her the opportunity to combine her professional interest in education with her work in the health sector. In addition, she has been an NHS service user since childhood and feels she can use her experience of accessing services, to contribute to the wider patient experience agenda.

She brings with her extensive experience of inspecting the quality of education/training and work-based learning programmes within the health/social care sectors and feels this is also relevant to the work of NHS England.

Manoj Mistry

Manoj joined PAF in September 2017. He is a lay PPI representative for the Department of Health, NHS England, Health and Care Professions Council and Authority. He has extensive experience of caring for family members. He holds degrees in BSc (Hons) Economics, Masters in Business Administration (MBA) and MSc (Cranfield).

Charlotte Papworth

Has experience of mental health services having a diagnosis of bipolar and experiencing post-natal psychosis after the births of her children. She has worked for the past 10 years in her local authority's children's services, as an Equality and Participation Officer, supporting, delivering training, and writing guidance for schools and social workers. Her work prior to this was front line with vulnerable children, young people, families, and adults.

Amy Reubens

Amy has experienced a range of children's and adolescent's services as an outpatient under Great Ormond Street Hospital and more recently the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. She also has four years' experience working with patients in a pre-hospital environmental, through her voluntary work as a first aider for St John Ambulance. Amy has a particular interest in advocating for and representing the voices of other young people.

Theodor Sergiou

Theo is undertaking a gap year and will proceed to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at degree level with an offer from Keble College, Oxford. He is deeply involved in politics at diverse levels and wants to be equipped with the knowledge to change the society in which we live, advocating for a political system in which people can thrive. After being diagnosed with Retinoblastoma as a child, he’s been in and out of hospital like it's his second home; understanding the reality of hospital life, he strove to support those involved, as he co-founded the BART’s Health Youth Forum and joined the NHS England Youth Forum. As the youngest person in British history to contribute into a No.10 cabinet meeting, Theo’s passion for creating opportunities for people from all backgrounds has led to him achieving successful programmes in areas such as healthcare, knife crime, special needs, poetry, and education. Constantly making the impossible, possible.

Veena Soni

Veena started her career as a teacher working with young people of all ages in a variety of educational settings. From here she went on to work in central then local government specialising in Equality and Diversity particularly focusing to ensure all strategic services, including the NHS and its associated services met the needs of the Black, Minority and Ethnic (BME) communities. She has produced several regional resources and initiatives to support the services sector enabling them to understand the BME community and its needs. Alongside her career, for the last 30 years she has been a carer looking after sick parents who have used a wide range of community and local health services. This has helped her to understand, the services that are being offered, what is being delivered and, the needs of the patients. She often worked with services helping them to reach out to the communities and improve their offering. As a PAF member she would like to use her experiences to support the development of services to ensure they meet the needs of all users and provide a unique perspective both from her career and personal experience.

Haania Hussain

Haania, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Nottingham, has utilised her own experiences in the NHS to improve healthcare services for children and young people at a national level. From ages 15 to 20, she actively participated in the Young Person's Advisory Group at Birmingham Children's Hospital, where she held the role of Equality and Diversity Lead and was a member of the NHS Youth Forum for three years, In addition, Haania sits as a patient representative within the Asthma Oversight Group, part of the Children and Young People Transformation Board in NHS England, in which she contributed to the development of the National Bundle of Care for Children and Young People with Asthma.

Haania is deeply committed to increasing awareness of health disparities and is a member of the NHS Muslim Women’s Network. Moreover, Haania actively participated in a national project that focused on health disparities among minority ethnic communities and how medical student education impacts them, resulting in key stakeholders implementing some of the recommendations from the project's report.

As a member of the Patient and Family Advisory Forum (PAF), Haania seeks to utilize her unique blend of experiences as a patient, medical student, and NHS volunteer to provide a comprehensive perspective. Her aim is to ensure that the work carried out by the NHS is representative of service users and those within the healthcare workforce and training.