DrDoctor Will See You Now

DrDoctor Product Director, Brigitte West and Commercial Lead, Lauren Wybrow, step in as guest hosts to talk with Dr Jane Padmore, Chief Executive of Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, about the winding, unplanned route that took her from a quiet pupil in a special needs class to running a half-a-billion-pound NHS mental health trust.
Jane talks candidly about growing up in a matriarchal but traditionally gendered household, growing in leadership roles by following curiosity rather than ambition, and building an executive team on values rather than CVs.
This powerful conversation explores what authentic leadership actually looks like day-to-day - from crying in meetings to an open office door - and how a late-in-life autism diagnosis reframed how Jane thinks about reasonable adjustments, for her team and, ultimately, for herself.

Tom sits down with Professor Tim Whittlestone, the new Group Chief Medical and Innovation Officer at Bristol NHS Trust and a consultant urologist of 25 years, to talk about what it really takes to redesign a health system around the patient.
Tim traces his own journey from early resistance to robotic surgery through to leading system-wide transformation, arguing that up to 60% of outpatient appointments add little or no value and that data, genomics and wearable technology can shift care out of hospital buildings altogether.

In this latest episode with Professor Ian Abbs, we chat about what large-scale health data, agentic technology and a bit of systems thinking could do to reshape care over the next few decades.
Tom & Ian explore how large healthcare datasets and agentic AI can enable dynamic outpatient services that focus clinicians’ time on high‑value care, and using natural‑language agentic interfaces to match patients to the right care at the right time.
They imagine a future of precision prediction and prevention that improves healthspan, lowers costs, and narrows inequalities through better data and true culture change.

In this episode, we conclude our conversation with Umang Patel, CCIO at Microsoft. With Tom, they look at a simple observation: patients go home and Google what they've just been told, so the real question is what continuous, trustworthy support looks like once the clinic door shuts.
They also chat all things AI governance, language access, the economics of value-based care, and a hard-won lesson about culture from the collapse of Babylon Health.

In this latest episode with Professor Ian Abbs, formerly CEO at Guy's and St Thomas', unpacks two of healthcare's stickiest problems: why innovation so often gets bolted on rather than swapped in, and what fifty years of EPR deployments actually teach us.
Together, they discuss the "cost cake" - the NHS habit of adding a new layer of spend for every new tool, rather than cutting old layers out - acknowledging free pilots make this worse and that suppliers who carry real delivery risk get better outcomes than those who hand over a product and walk away.
Ian also reflects on his own experience leading two major EPR deployments: IPM in the early 2000s and Epic at Guy's and St Thomas' and King's College Hospital in the 2020s. 

In this episode, we conclude our conversation with Milica Stjepanovic, Deputy Director of Operations at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, unpacking how the Trust moved from a full to a choice booking model - and what happens when you layer automation on top.
Mel shares the phased rollout that took Imperial from two services to Trust-wide adoption, the cultural shift needed to make it stick, and the results: a drop from 1.7 million to 1.2 million booked appointments, with the difference coming out of unnecessary rebooking and DNAs rather than patient access. 

In part two of our series with Umang Patel, CCIO at Microsoft, Tom and Umang explore what the NHS's digital future really looks like once you get past the infrastructure excuses - and who's actually driving change. Drawing on real clinical encounters, startup lessons, and a candid conversation about purpose vs profit, this episode argues that the bottleneck was never the technology. It was always the context locked inside people's heads - and whether we're brave enough to let go of it.

In episode 2 of our series with Professor Ian Abbs (former CEO of Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust), we discuss what it actually takes to lead one of England's largest healthcare organisations - and why the NHS systemically underestimates the risk of doing nothing.
Ian traces his CMO-to-CEO transition, his "inverted triangle" leadership philosophy, and the cultural and structural barriers that slow NHS innovation adoption - highlighting DrDoctor's own deployment at GSTT and how, even though DrDoctor was made available to NHS organisations for free via the zero-tariff innovation programme, almost none could execute on it. 

In the second episode of DrDoctor Will See You Now with Imperial College Healthcare, we look at the numbers. Since going live in August of last year, the results have been striking: hospital cancellations down 59%, patient-initiated cancellations down 45%, and the DNA rate dropping to an all-time trust low of 9.4% - with a target of 7% firmly in sight.
Mel and Tom also dig into how the backlog is defined and misunderstood, why chronic patients need a different approach, how linked diagnostic appointments are being managed through pre-validation, and the cultural resistance that proved harder to navigate than the operational change itself. 

Microsoft Chief Clinical Information Officer and paediatric doctor, Umang Patel joins the podcast to reflect on his journey from Babylon and early digital health experiments to today’s AI revolution. Having first met in 2012, Tom and Umang discuss lessons from the 2010s, the NHS’s unique strengths, and the growing role of clinicians in leading transformation.
The episode explores practical changes now arriving in hospitals - from AI scribes and ambient notes to smarter MDTs and clinician-led innovation - and why this moment feels like a real opportunity to scale better, more equitable care.