Speaker: Rukshana Kapasi, Barnardo’s Director of Health
The Nick Robin Memorial Lecture
Facing the future: supporting child and family health through collaboration and innovation
Nick Robin was a former editor of the Community Practitioner Journal who championed social issues in health. This prestigious memorial lecture honours the significant contribution he made to the sector.
Rukshana has been working in the NHS and charitable sector for the last 30 years as a provider, commissioner, board member and senior leader. She is Barnardo’s first Director of Health, leading the transformation of the largest children’s charity in the UK to enable it to become a health and social care provider.
Rukshana is a non-executive director at Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust, an advisory commissioner for the Health Devolution Commission and is co-chair of the Child Equity Collaborative with Sir Michael Marmot.
As chair of IBD UK, a collaboration of 17 royal colleges and patient organisations, she led the co-production of standards and a digital benchmarking tool now used by all IBD centres across the UK. During her career, she has brought about key directional changes in the health sector, such as the evaluation of PALS Pathfinder Pilots, which led to patient advice and liaison services being introduced in every hospital in England and the Patient Choice system now used by GPs.
She has been instrumental in driving the infrastructure to improve health inequalities in the NHS, leading the first pilot of ethnicity monitoring in primary care for the Department of Health and designing the national roll-out for all HS Trusts. She has published widely in the field of health equity and was voted a Top 100 Social Impact Influencer in 2024.
RUKSHANA SAYS:
‘Families today are facing more challenges than ever before to stay well and healthy. Great support for children and families begins close to home – and that means from within the community, with the people on the ground who know them the best. Connecting to wider systems of support to improve, for example, health literacy, food insecurity and mental health, is now becoming increasingly essential for families experiencing some of the worst inequalities.
I am looking forward to exploring how, by joining forces and collaborating across systems, we can work together to support prevention, encourage early intervention and promote child health and wellbeing for now and future generations.’