Spotlight on antimicrobial resistance: A slow pandemic

Dame Sally is UK Special Envoy on Antimicrobial Resistance. Before this, she was Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for England and Chief Medical Adviser to the UK government from March 2011 to September 2019, having held the post on an interim basis since June 2010.

Dame Sally advocates globally on AMR. She has spoken on AMR at numerous events including the World Health Assembly side events, the G8 science ministers’ meeting in 2015, the Global Health Security Initiative in 2015, and the UN General Assembly side event in 2016. She was chair of the 2013 AMR forum at the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) and was for three years the chair of the WHO Strategic and Technical Advisory Group on AMR. Most recently, Dame Sally has been appointed a co-convener of the UN Inter-Agency Co-ordination Group on AMR, set up in response to the AMR declaration made at UNGA 2016.

Dame Sally was a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Executive Board 2014-2016 and has led delegations to a range of WHO summits and forums since 2004. She is currently a non-executive director on the boards of: The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation; Genomics England Ltd; The Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford; The Clinton Health Access Initiative; and UK Research & Innovation. She was formerly on the boards of Cumberland Lodge and Ashridge Business School.

From 2004-2016, Dame Sally was the Chief Scientific Adviser (CSA) for the Department of Health (DH), where she was actively involved in NHS R&D from its establishment and founded the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). Dame Sally received her DBE in 2009. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014 and a member of the National Academy of Medicine, USA in 2015.

Keith has been Chief Pharmaceutical Officer for England since 2006. The role is head of profession for the pharmacy professions and the principal advisor on pharmacy and medicines use. He leads on issues such as medicines optimisation, clinical pharmacy in primary care, pharmacy educational reform and transforming pharmacy practice in line with the NHS Long Term Plan.

He is also the NHS SRO for the pharmacy and prescribing element of the UK AMR strategy. He has led Government reviews on medication errors and overprescribing, the latter being published recently. His role also supports the Department of Health and Social Care, broader Government and Health Education England. He is a visiting professor in the Infectious Diseases section at the Imperial College Medical School. 

Kat is a computational biologist specialising in infectious disease genomics.

She is Professor of Microbial Systems Genomics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) Department of Infection Biology, and Co-Director of the LSHTM AMR Centre.

She is also an Adjunct Professor (Research) at Monash University’s Department of Infectious Diseases in Melbourne, Australia; a HHMI-Gates International Research Scholar; and Editor-in-Chief of the UK Microbiology Society journal Microbial Genomics.

Professor Leonard was appointed as a Consultant Thoracic Physician in Manchester in October 2000, and is also an Honorary Professor of Respiratory Medicine at Manchester Academic Health Sciences Centre.

Since 2008 Prof Leonard has also been working as Consultant Clinical Adviser for the Centre for Health Technology Evaluation at NICE which involves assessing which novel pharmaceutical and MedTech products will benefit from a NICE assessment.

A significant amount of Prof Leonard’s time over the past 4 years has been spent with colleagues in NICE, Department of Health and Social Care, and NHS England & Improvement working as clinical lead for the UK project to develop a novel value assessment & reimbursement mechanism for new antimicrobials.

Prof Leonard still spends 50% of his time as a pulmonologist specialising in severe lung disease, particularly Sarcoidosis and other interstitial lung problems.