MUIR GRAY
Muir entered the Public Health Service by joining the City of Oxford Health Department in 1972 after qualifying in medicine in Glasgow, the city of his birth
The first phase of his professional career in 1971 focused on disease prevention, for example on helping people stop smoking. He also developed a local, then national programme of work to promote health in old age, at a time before the implications of population ageing had been recognised. Based on work in Oxford he developed a number of national initiatives, particularly designed to prevent hospital admission and facilitate hospital discharge, including preventing hypothermia, publishing a Fabian Society report on the relationship between housing and poverty and the excess winter death, that took place in the United Kingdom. He was the Secretary of ASH Action on Smoking and Health
Then he developed all the screening programmes in the NHS, for pregnant women, children, adults and older people for example offering men aged sixty five screening for abdominal aortic aneurysm and , for both men and women, screening for colorectal cancer. He also developed services to bring knowledge to patients and professionals. Working on the principle that the delivery of clean, clear knowledge was analogous to the provision of clean, clear water he saw the organisation and delivery of knowledge as a public health service, for example developing NHS Choices www.nhs.uk and setting up the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford. During this period he was appointed as the Chief Knowledge Officer of the NHS and was awarded both a CBE and later a Knighthood for services for the NHS.
He was a Professor in Knowledge Management in the Nuffield Department of Surgery, and a Professor in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences where he led work on Evidence Based Medicine and Value. He set up the Centre for Sustainable Healthcare and Better Value Healthcare and has published a series of How To Handbooks for example, How to Get Better Value Healthcare, How To Build Healthcare Systems andHow To Create the Right Healthcare Culture of Stewardship. His hobby is ageing and how to cope with it
Here is what he says about his health "I am a fairly typical healthy 82 year old, I had an attack of polio when i was seven which left my right leg a little thinner than my left, but I could still play sport, then at 12 I developed acute kidney failure but in the days before dialysis was lucky enough to recover. Also i grew up in a filthy city, Glasgow before the Clean Air Act, and my parents smoked. This will be typical of many people who are 70 plus today. Then about eleven years ago I had heart attack, although at 'low risk', but made a very good recovery, thanks to a stent in one of my arteries. To stay healthy i try to walk briskly using the www.nhs.uk/oneyou app, eat a mediterranean diet, minimise stress and sleep eight hours a night, and every year i try to take more action against ageing for example by increasing the time spent stretching. since then i have had two adventures. i tripped running for a train , which was late and broke 7 ribs, 5 of them in two places, then a year later i developed severe sciatica and am still a little weak in my left leg."
He is the Chair of the Advisory board of the NHS programme www.livelongerbetter.uk and works closely with two Oxford initiatives - the Oxford Longevity Project and the online group learning company Learning with Experts , where the real experts are the other people you are learning with
DAVID HYMANS
David is manager of the knowledge. He has done a number of jobs but all of them have focused on making things happen. e was a very early adopter of the Internet and is now working with Muir to produce the Healthy Ageing Service which provides the knowledge you need to make important decisions. David an Muir both work with the Oxford Longevity Project whose
- vision is a world in which all adults understand how they can best improve their healthspan and take action to do so and whose
- mission is to communicate the latest breakthroughs in longevity science and be a guide and advocate for personal, social and political action .