Dr Nicholas Hicks
Dr Nicholas Hicks is an Associate Fellow and lead for the Management in Medicine Programme, Green Templeton College and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford. He is also a Senior Strategy Advisor to the UK government’s Department of Health and Social Care’s Systems Strategy Unit.
Nicholas is an alumnus of the inaugural intake at then-Green College, joining to undertake Clinical Medicine in 1979. After training in general practice in Bath and public health in Bristol he spent an exciting year as a Harkness Fellow based at the RAND Corporation – a US policy think tank – in Santa Monica, California before returning to Oxford as Consultant in Public Health.
Nicholas worked with Sir Iain Chalmers as he set up the Cochrane Collaboration, Professor David Sackett as he set up the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine and Professor Colin Baigent at the Clinical Trials Unit trying to turn the implications of their work into practice.
For four years from 1998, he worked in Whitehall as lead author of the National Service Framework for Coronary Heart Disease then as the doctor in a newly established ministerial strategy unit working to Health Secretary Alan Milburn.
He went on to become Director of Public Health in Milton Keynes and Chief Executive of the Primary Care Trust (PCT). Following the Lansley reforms of 2012, he set up a small consultancy to pursue his interests in outcome measurement, population health management and health policy.
In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic reached the UK, he joined Public Health England and then the UK HeaIth Security Agency where I worked as the Public Health Strategy Advisor to the Chief Medical Advisor (Susan Hopkins) until 2023.
