User:Clewington/Tim Kelsey

Tim Kelsey (45) is a British journalist who co-founded Dr Foster the organisation which internationally pioneered publication of comparative hospital death rates and other measures of health quality. Kelsey has become a leading activist for transparency in quality in public services and was the architect and launch programme director of NHS Choices, the national health service’s online information service which publishes comparative data on NHS performance.

In 2000, Kelsey, then news editor at the Sunday Times, founded Dr Foster with Roger Taylor, a former Financial Times journalist, and Roger Killen, a Stanford graduate. The organisation was set up to promote information on the quality of local health services to patients and the public. Kelsey explained his motives in an article in the New Statesman magazine in 2001.

In 2001, Dr Foster – named after an English nursery rhyme character - published the first annual Good Hospital Guide in the Sunday Times. It revealed widespread variation in adjusted death rates between English hospitals and was the first time such a comparative measure of quality had been published for a national health economy. The methodology was developed by Prof Sir Brian Jarman, director of the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College, London. It prompted widespread media interest and stimulated a national debate over quality in healthcare. Rt Hon Alan Milburn MP, then secretary of state for health, told the BBC in response to the publication: "The NHS has acted like a secret society. It has to recognise that people now expect to be treated like consumers".

The Dr Foster Hospital Guide is published annually and remains an important independent publication on quality in NHS hospitals. In 2009, it identified a number of underperforming hospitals in England. .

Since 2001, Kelsey has overseen publication of a series of similar consumer guides to individual hospital consultants, maternity services , and complementary therapists among others.

Kelsey was chief executive of Dr Foster between 2000 and 2006 during which time it was reported the 9th fastest growing private company in the UK by the Sunday Times. In 2006, a public body - the NHS Information Centre - purchased 50% of the company and Kelsey became chair of the Executive Board of the new organisation – Dr Foster Intelligence. Besides publishing information to the public, Dr Foster Intelligence also provides analytic services to around 85% of NHS hospitals in England and also works with health organisations in Europe and the US.

In 2008, Kelsey won the HealthInvestor award for Outstanding Contribution as an Individual to Healthcare for his work with Dr Foster.

In 2006 he was appointed to design the national NHS online information service, NHS Choices, by the Department of Health. The project, designed to promote greater patient choice in healthcare, launched in 2007.

Kelsey is a trustee of the Nuffield Trust, a leading British policy think tank, and a commissioner of the 2020 Public Services Trust. He chaired the 2020 public technology group which published a report arguing for more transparency in public services – Online or Inline – in March 2010.

In 2009, Kelsey was appointed a lay member of the National Quality Board of the NHS.

After graduating in history from Magdalene College, Cambridge, Kelsey worked for The Independent, based in Ankara, Turkey and then joined the staff of The Independent on Sunday for whom he covered the 1990 Gulf War as a combat pool reporter. In 1995 he joined the Sunday Times and was appointed news editor in 1998.