Professor Rob George
Medical Director, St Christopher’s Hospice, Professor of Palliative Care, Cicely Saunders’ Institute, UCL
Speaker's biography
Following accreditation in Respiratory and General Medicine and a doctorate on breathlessness, Rob pioneered HIV & non-cancer palliative care from 1987-2003 at UCL Hospitals during which time he established the first NHS Hospice@Home service.
From 2003-2006 he had a portfolio of consultancies working with specialist palliative care services facing various operational difficulties in settings across the voluntary sector, combined NHS and Independent Hospice Services and in NHS posts spanning the community, specialist beds and acute hospitals.
From 2006-2015 he was back in the NHS full time covering the community around Ealing and then Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals in Central London.
In September 2015 he became Medical Director at St Christopher’s Hospice, but continues with some NHS sessions.
As a leader and influencer, he was clinical lead for Palliative/EoLC for London from 2007-13 and was President of the Association for Palliative Medicine of Great Britain and Ireland from 2014-6.
He is on the council of the RCP, has sat on RCP working parties reporting on aspects of palliative and end of life care and Prolonged Disorders of Consciousness. He advises various Government Departments on EoL matters. He has also provided expert opinions on a number of high profile legal cases that involve end of life decisions and challenges to legislation around physician-assisted suicide in the UK and abroad. He has sat on various ethics committees over the years.
He is a clinical academic, rather than an experimental researcher and before gaining his professorship at the Cicely Saunders Institute, KCL, he was Senior Lecturer in Bioethics at UCL. He has around a hundred and forty publications.
