The Future for Cancer Services

Sarah Tiffin is the British Ambassador to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. She took up her post in April 2023.

Before her appointment as Ambassador, Sarah was the Deputy Head of Mission at the British Embassy in Ireland. She was responsible for leading work on the UK’s departure from the EU and on Northern Ireland, as well as for overseeing the running of the Embassy. Before that, she was Deputy Head of Mission in Poland, and in London served as Head of East Africa, Great Lakes, and Somalia Department, overseeing the UK’s diplomatic engagement in the region.

A career diplomat, Sarah joined the FCO in 1988. She has also been posted to India and Paris, has worked at the UK’s representation to the EU, and has been seconded twice to the Irish Government. Much of her career has been focused on EU policy, but her work has also spanned many other areas including strategic policy planning, human rights policy, conflict resolution and development.

Sarah is married to the current Irish Ambassador to Indonesia and ASEAN and has three children. She has balanced her career and her family for 25 years, including through many forms of flexible working (job-sharing, remote working, part-time work, project work, and career breaks). She is a strong advocate for ensuring that the workplace culture is family-friendly and supports flexible working, as a necessary underpinning for diversity and inclusion.

Outside work, Sarah enjoys reading fiction, travelling, and spending time with family and friends over good food. She is an avid watcher of sports and supports her local football team from the Northeast of England, Darlington FC.

Chris, a former NHS CEO has worked as a senior consultant healthcare specialist with Healthcare UK based at the UK Department for Business and Trade (DBT) for the last eleven years. He is an experienced executive coach and mentor and has a passion for improving health and care worldwide.

Chris has worked with hundreds of NHS and commercial health and care organisations in the UK to take their export offer to operators, developers, investors, governments, and health services in the target markets of India, China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and other countries. He has been responsible for the development of a detailed set of international UK offers, including digital health, NHS Innovation, clinical services (most recently diabetes, oncology, cardiac services, and mental health), training and education and healthcare infrastructure.

Chris worked for 25 years as a senior leader in the NHS both in an NHS Trust and as an NHS commissioner. Chris also worked in a predecessor of NHS England (the NHS Executive) and in 2012 was seconded to the then Department of Health to develop NHS Global (which led to the creation of Healthcare UK).

Shuhaela F. Haqim has devoted her career to working almost exclusively with the public sector in Indonesia and she is currently leading TBI Indonesia country operation. She started her journey at McKinsey Jakarta and prior to TBI, she was leading Deloitte's Government and Public Service practice as a partner in their Southeast Asia hub - leading the practice's commercial growth and managing all their public sector client relationships in Indonesia. Some of her past experience involves designing large-scale economic transformation plans, setting up governance structures for infrastructure mega-projects, as well as structuring toll road, energy and transport transactions. Ela has worked directly for many different senior Ministers and their special advisors across Indonesia's central and regional governments. She is also appointed as one of the public policy experts in preparing the Republic of Indonesia’s BPK (Financial Audit Agency) Foresight publication: Indonesia Remade by Covid-19: Scenarios, Opportunities, and Challenges for a Resilient Government.

Ela has always been an advocate for women's leadership and nation-building in her country; being a mentor at WomenWorks (a platform that builds connections for women to achieve their professional goals) as well as the founder of IYS - Indonesian Youth for SMEs which is a social platform that provides free business consultancy to micro and small enterprises.

David became the Director of Policy and Strategy for the NHS Cancer Programme in January 2018. He joined NHS England after four years in the Cabinet Office Implementation Unit, where he led the social policy team which advised the Prime Minister on the delivery of her top priorities in areas including health, education, skills, housing, and welfare. From 2008 to 2013, David worked at the Department for Education, first as bill manager for the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill and then as head of the Childcare Funding Division, leading the implementation of the coalition government’s commitment to extend free childcare to two-year-olds from low-income families. Before that, David spent 12 years at the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport where he worked on arts, sport, and gambling policy, and as Private Secretary to the Arts Minister.

Louise holds a PhD in immunology from Imperial College London and drawing on both her background in science and years of experience in drug discovery, development and commercialisation within academia, biotech and pharmaceutical organisations, she leads the commercial team at Eastern AHSN to develop partnerships and support innovators to refine their business models and value propositions to ensure commercial sustainability.

Louise joined Eastern AHSN from Johnson and Johnson Innovation, where she led partnership activities across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa to identify and incubate external assets and capabilities to advance the portfolio of the Immunology Therapy Area for Janssen.

Ti Hwei is the VP of International Oncology at AstraZeneca, a role he has served since May 2020. Prior to this, he has been the Country President (CP) of AstraZeneca Singapore since January 2016. During his tenure as CP of Singapore, Ti Hwei was the President of the Singapore Association of Pharmaceutical Industries (SAPI), and the Chair of the European Chamber of Commerce (EuroCham) Healthcare Committee.

Ti Hwei was the CP for AstraZeneca Malaysia/Singapore from September 2014 to December 2015, and the CP of AstraZeneca Vietnam from April 2012 to August 2014. He also served as a Board member of the EuroCham Vietnam Pharma Group when he was CP of AstraZeneca Vietnam. Ti Hwei first joined AstraZeneca Vietnam as Marketing Director in July 2010.

He is also a member of the National University of Singapore Pharmacy Programme Advisory Board, and the Ngee Ann Polytechnic Life Sciences & Chemical Technology Advisory Committee.

Ti Hwei’s 25-year career spans across Pharmaceutical & FMCG industries, having worked in other MNCs like Proctor & Gamble (P&G) and Johnson & Johnson (J&J). A Singapore national, he was educated and trained as a Pharmacist and holds an MBA from the National University of Singapore.

Outside of Singapore, he has lived and worked in Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia. He stays active through tennis and mountain biking.

Gillian Rosenberg leads the cancer innovation team at NHS England and is responsible for enabling the implementation of prioritised innovations that will support the NHS Long Term Plan ambitions. This is achieved by overseeing several workstreams that deliver real-world implementation pilots of promising cancer innovations including the Cancer Programme Innovation Open Call; national implementation pilots for Cytosponge (a sponge-on-a-string improve oesophageal cancer diagnosis) and GRAIL (a new multi-cancer early diagnosis blood test); and funding local innovations via Cancer Alliances. Gillian has previously undertaken a number of roles at the interface between research and implementation, in both NHS and charity organisations, delivering evidence to bring about impactful changes in healthcare policy and practice. These roles have given her experience across multiple research disciplines including basic science; public health; policy research, clinical diagnostic testing and validation of new technologies. She also holds a PhD in Chemical Biology from Imperial College.

Dr Kazmi qualified from the University of Aberdeen in 1991 with a Commendation, he is a member of the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT), International Myeloma Society, Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management and American Society of Haematology (ASH). He has been a consultant since 2001 at Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Trust.

He is currently the Director of Innovation for Cancer and Surgery at Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Trust. He was previously Chief of Cancer services and Clinical Director for Oncology and Haematology.

He led the development of the £160 million Cancer centre built on the Guy’s Hospital Campus. He is a CQC specialist adviser and has supported the work of NICE in providing expert advice to support technology appraisals in myeloma.

Dr Kazmi is seen as an innovator in healthcare. He helped set up the first Trust AI board and appointed the first clinical lead for AI in a UK hospital.

His clinical interests include Myeloma where he has been the UK Chief Investigator on several studies. He has extensive experience in Transplantation and is the UK lead for transplantation in auto-immune diseases for EBMT.

Dr Khor Swee Kheng is a Malaysian physician specializing in health systems and global health, based in Singapore. He is CEO of Angsana Health (building primary care systems in Southeast Asia), Visiting Assistant Professor at the Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health National University of Singapore, a Member of the Health White Paper Advisory Council to the Malaysian Health Ministry, and Co-Chair of a Lancet Commission on Preparedness for Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Previously, he held progressively senior practice roles (Malaysian Health Ministry, Abbott and AbbVie) and academic roles (Chatham House and United Nations University). In these roles, he was based in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Dubai, Shanghai, Paris, Oxford and Hong Kong, covering >90 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He holds three postgraduate degrees, in internal medicine (Royal College of Physicians), public health (Berkeley) and public policy (Oxford), and has published >190 articles in international academic journals, think tanks and media.

Roger Spencer has been the Chief Executive since December 2013.

Roger has managed significant Christie service developments including the creation of a network of oncology (radiotherapy and chemotherapy) centres which have transformed the delivery of services for the 3.2m population of Greater Manchester and Cheshire. He led the establishment of The Christie’s innovation partnerships with government, commercial, third sector and academic organisations. These include pathology, specialist diagnostic services, private patients (HCA Healthcare- The Christie Private Care) and an academic investment partnership.

In 2016 he led the Trust to a CQC Outstanding rating, repeated in 2018. In the same year, The Christie opened the UK’s first national proton service.

Roger led for Greater Manchester on the National Cancer Vanguard developing and testing new models of care. He is the Chair of the Greater Manchester Cancer Alliance GM Cancer and the Greater Manchester Clinical Research Network GM CRN and a member of the Manchester Cancer Research Centre Steering Board MCRC Governance, working with a comprehensive group of stakeholders to improve and develop leading-edge cancer services.

He is a member of the National Cancer Board of NHS England and chairs their Early Detection and Screening Task and Finish Group.
He is a member of the Healthcare UK Panel of Advisors.

Dr Ben Widaja is the President Director of Mandaya Hospital Group, a healthcare subsidiary of Selaras Holding which is a multi-industry holding company encompassing real estate, hospitality, healthcare, and F&B.

After graduating as a medical doctor from the University of Manchester (UK) and working at several NHS hospitals in the UK, Dr Ben returned to Indonesia to lead the group's effort to combine its years of experience in real estate, hospitality, and healthcare to develop quality hospitals with Patient and Family Experience Concept.

The group's latest development is the newly built Mandaya Royal Hospital Puri, a premium and advanced General Hospital in West Jakarta with centres of excellence in Cardiovascular, Neuroscience and Oncology.