Dr Kerri Jones

Until 2016, Kerri was Consultant in Anaesthesia & Critical Care at Torbay Hospital, Devon where she led day surgery, pre-operative assessment and enhanced recovery development.  After acquisition of a large Department of Health grant to promote innovation, she became the first NHS Associate Medical Director for Innovation & Improvement through which she co-developed the Horizon Centre for Innovation, Education & Research.  She became an adviser to several national Department of Health programmes and was named as one of the HSJ ’50 top NHS innovators’ in 2014. She was a Council member of the British Association of Day Surgery and President of the Society of Anaesthetist for the SW region.

Kerri started work in Kenya in 2009, initially volunteering as an anaesthetist on trauma surgery projects.  She established a THET health partnership which was awarded several DFID grants, enabling the development of further clinical & teaching initiatives.  She co-founded the charity Future Health Africa www.futurehealthafrica.org, to support work in LMICs.  From the start of the Kenya work, she saw the urgent need for system improvement to accompany clinical initiatives and created the q4a (quality for all) faculty within Future Health Africa.  This faculty designed and now delivers a Quality Improvement & Leadership skills training programme (SPRINGBOARD) to empower front-line healthworkers to make their own system improvements. To date, the q4a work has attracted 3 DFID grants. She is a founding Board member of the new Society for Quality Healthcare in Kenya (SQHK).  She holds an Honorary Associate Professorship at the University of Plymouth where she lectures ad hoc on topics related to global health, innovation and QI. She is part of the Global Health Collaborative at the University which she helped to establish. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter Business School where she contributed to a large EU-funded 3 year innovation research programme (TACIT).  She started her role as Honorary Adviser to THET in January 2020.