A SENIOR NHS leader with three decades of experience in the medical profession, Professor Kiran Patel is the chief medical officer and deputy chief executive of the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust. Joining the Trust in July 2019 as medical director, he would soon find himself leading the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. On December 8, 2020, he made history when he prescribed the world’s first Covid-19 vaccine outside of a clinical trial.

Dr Patel has been at the forefront of developing a new tool to address the NHS backlog, as the heath service remains under severe strain with millions of patients on waiting lists for hospital treatment, and emergency departments unable to see patients promptly. In 2022, the UHCW developed the Health Equity and Referral to Treatment (HEARTT), a tool that allocates priority for patients on the waiting list for planned care according to clinical as well as social factors, meaning the software can take health inequalities into account when prioritising patients for elective care. For Patel, who grew up in a ‘two-up two down terraced house’ in West Bromwich but graduated from Cambridge University’s King’s College, the issue of equity has always been close to his heart.

“As I grew up and went to university at Cambridge and subsequently started working, I suppose I personally experienced social mobility. But then I always wanted to go back and do something for the communities I came from,” he has told a NHS Confederation podcast. And with the HEARTT tool, he believes we now have the capability to move be yond NHS England’s elective recovery plan, which prioritises those who have waited longest, but is prone to fuelling health inequalities.

The tool accommodates evidence based clinical factors and builds upon those to add in factors which drive or