Jason Leitch

Last updated

Honorary Professor

Jason Leitch

Photo - Jason Leitch Large.jpg
Born
Jason Andrew Leitch

(1968-10-25) October 25, 1968 (age 55)
Education University of Glasgow (1991) Harvard University (2006)
OccupationNational Clinical Director for the Scottish Government
Years active1991–present
Medical career
Profession Dentistry
Field Health care, dentistry, NHS Scotland

Jason Andrew Leitch CBE FRCS (born 25 October 1968) is the National Clinical Director of Healthcare Quality and Strategy for the Scottish Government. [1] He is a Senior Clinical Advisor to the Scottish Government and a member of the Health and Social Care Management Board. Leitch was involved in the COVID-19 pandemic response, where his duties included communicating complex scientific information to the public. [2] [3]

Contents

Early life

Leitch was born on 25 October 1968, the elder of two children, to Jim and Irene Leitch. His mother was an office manager and his father was a coal miner, electrical engineer, and college educator. Leitch attended Airdrie Academy from 1980 to 1986. [3]

Leitch graduated in dentistry from the University of Glasgow in 1991. He became a Fellow of the Faculty of Dental Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons (England) in 1996. He has a doctorate from the University of Glasgow (2004), a Masters in Public Health from Harvard University (2006) and is a fellow of The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow (2004) and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (2004). He is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2004). He was a 2005-06 Quality Improvement Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), in Boston, sponsored by the Health Foundation, he is now a Senior Fellow at the IHI.

Career

Leitch during a COVID-19 press conference, 2020 COVID-19 press conference - 18 December 2020 (50733208397).jpg
Leitch during a COVID-19 press conference, 2020

Clinical

Leitch completed a number of training jobs in the West of Scotland prior to becoming a Clinical Lecturer and Honorary Consultant in Oral Surgery at Glasgow Dental Hospital and School.

Scottish Government

Leitch has worked for the Scottish Government since 2007 when he joined as the National Clinical Lead for Safety and Improvement. This was followed by roles as the National Clinical Lead for Quality; the Clinical Director of the Quality Unit and he is now the National Clinical Director in the Health and Social Care Directorate.

Leitch was part of the senior team who conceived, designed and led the Scottish Patient Safety Programme.

Responsibilities

Leitch is a member of the Health and Social Care Management Board and one of the senior team responsible for implementation of the NHS Scotland Quality Strategy. [4]

Leitch is responsible for quality in the health and social care system, including patient safety and person-centred care, NHS planning, and implementing quality improvement methods across the government and the broader public sector. He is a member of the Transformational Change as well as the Performance Boards at the Scottish Government.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Leitch has played a key role in public health communication and engagement. [3] He regularly featured at Scottish Government press conferences as well as public engagement on regional and national television and radio. He received praise for his ability to communicate complex scientific information to the public. [2] He regularly featured on programmes such as Off the Ball to answer questions submitted by members of the public. [5] In March 2020 he assessed that it was impossible to suppress the virus, that 80% of the population becoming infected was inevitable, and that all that could be done was to smooth the epidemic out over a lengthy period of time, so not to overwhelm the health services too much. [6] [7]

Board positions

Awards and honours

2011: HFMA UK Clinician of the Year. [9]

2013: Honorary Professor at the University of Dundee.

2019: Honorary Professor at the University of Strathclyde.

2019: Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to healthcare and charity. [10]

2020: The Fletcher of Saltoun Award for Science.

2020: Member of National Academy of Medicine.

2022 Meritorious Endeavours in Environmental Health Award, The Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland.

Advisory roles

Leitch has been invited to speak at events around the world and has advised Governments in the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, The Republic of Ireland, Jordan, Canada, Brazil and South Africa.

He was appointed to the NHS England review group led by Don Berwick looking into the patient safety elements of the Francis Enquiry.

Leitch also serves as a College Ambassador for The College of General Dentistry.

Personal life

In 1992, Leitch married Lynn, a secondary school teacher. His younger sister, Vanessa, is a senior lecturer in further education. [3]

Selected bibliography

Presentations

Books

Articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dentistry</span> Branch of medicine

Dentistry, also known as dental medicine and oral medicine, is the branch of medicine focused on the teeth, gums, and mouth. It consists of the study, diagnosis, prevention, management, and treatment of diseases, disorders, and conditions of the mouth, most commonly focused on dentition as well as the oral mucosa. Dentistry may also encompass other aspects of the craniofacial complex including the temporomandibular joint. The practitioner is called a dentist.

Professor Sir Bruce Edward Keogh, KBE, FMedSci, FRCS, FRCP is a Rhodesian-born British surgeon who specialises in cardiac surgery. He was medical director of the National Health Service in England from 2007 and national medical director of the NHS Commissioning Board from 2013 until his retirement early in 2018. He is chair of Birmingham Women's and Children's NHS Foundation Trust.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dental assistant</span> Medical profession

Dental assistants are members of the dental team. They support a dental operator in providing more efficient dental treatment. Dental assistants are distinguished from other groups of dental auxiliaries by differing training, roles and patient scopes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NHS Scotland</span> Publicly-funded healthcare system in Scotland

NHS Scotland, sometimes styled NHSScotland, is the publicly funded healthcare system in Scotland and one of the four systems that make up the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. It operates 14 territorial NHS boards across Scotland, supported by seven special non-geographic health boards, and Public Health Scotland.

The Health and Social Care Directorates are a group of directorates of the Scottish Government. They are responsible for NHS Scotland, as well as policies on the development and implementation of health and social care.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dental public health</span>

Dental Public Health (DPH) is a para-clinical specialty of dentistry that deals with the prevention of oral disease and promotion of oral health. Dental public health is involved in the assessment of key dental health needs and coming up with effective solutions to improve the dental health of populations rather than individuals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Health Service (England)</span> Publicly-funded healthcare system in England

The National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded healthcare system in England, and one of the four National Health Service systems in the United Kingdom. It is the second largest single-payer healthcare system in the world after the Brazilian Sistema Único de Saúde. Primarily funded by the government from general taxation, and overseen by the Department of Health and Social Care, the NHS provides healthcare to all legal English residents and residents from other regions of the UK, with most services free at the point of use for most people. The NHS also conducts research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dental fear</span> Medical condition

Dental fear, or dentophobia, is a normal emotional reaction to one or more specific threatening stimuli in the dental situation. However, dental anxiety is indicative of a state of apprehension that something dreadful is going to happen in relation to dental treatment, and it is usually coupled with a sense of losing control. Similarly, dental phobia denotes a severe type of dental anxiety, and is characterised by marked and persistent anxiety in relation to either clearly discernible situations or objects or to the dental setting in general. The term ‘dental fear and anxiety’ (DFA) is often used to refer to strong negative feelings associated with dental treatment among children, adolescents and adults, whether or not the criteria for a diagnosis of dental phobia are met. Dental phobia can include fear of dental procedures, dental environment or setting, fear of dental instruments or fear of the dentist as a person. People with dental phobia often avoid the dentist and neglect oral health, which may lead to painful dental problems and ultimately force a visit to the dentist. The emergency nature of this appointment may serve to worsen the phobia. This phenomenon may also be called the cycle of dental fear. Dental anxiety typically starts in childhood. There is the potential for this to place strains on relationships and negatively impact on employment.

Evidence-based dentistry (EBD) is the dental part of the more general movement toward evidence-based medicine and other evidence-based practices. The pervasive access to information on the internet includes different aspects of dentistry for both the dentists and patients. This has created a need to ensure that evidence referenced to are valid, reliable and of good quality.

The American Dental Society of Anesthesiology (ADSA) is an American professional association established in 1953 and based in Chicago.

Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) is the national healthcare improvement organisation for Scotland. It is a public body which is part of the Scottish National Health Service, created in April 2011.

Health care quality is a level of value provided by any health care resource, as determined by some measurement. As with quality in other fields, it is an assessment of whether something is good enough and whether it is suitable for its purpose. The goal of health care is to provide medical resources of high quality to all who need them; that is, to ensure good quality of life, cure illnesses when possible, to extend life expectancy, and so on. Researchers use a variety of quality measures to attempt to determine health care quality, including counts of a therapy's reduction or lessening of diseases identified by medical diagnosis, a decrease in the number of risk factors which people have following preventive care, or a survey of health indicators in a population who are accessing certain kinds of care.

Dentistry provided by the National Health Service in the United Kingdom is supposed to ensure that dental treatment is available to the whole population. Most dentistry is provided by private practitioners, most of whom also provide, on a commercial basis, services which the NHS does not provide, largely cosmetic. Most adult patients have to pay some NHS charges, although these are often significantly cheaper than the cost of private dentistry. The majority of people choose NHS dental care rather than private care: as of 2005, the national average proportion of people opting for private care was 23%. NHS dentistry is not always available and is not managed in the way that other NHS services are managed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Private healthcare in the United Kingdom</span>

Private healthcare in the UK, where universal state-funded healthcare is provided by the National Health Service, is a niche market.

The Scottish Patient Safety Programme (SPSP) is national initiative to improve the reliability of healthcare and reduce the different types of harm that can be associated. The programme is co-ordinated by Healthcare Improvement Scotland and is the first example of a country introducing a national patient safety programme across the whole healthcare system. From an initial focus on acute hospitals, the SPSP now includes safety improvement programmes including SPSP Primary care, SPSP Medicines, Maternity and Children Quality Improvement Collaborative (MCQIC) and Mental Health.

The National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) is a registered charity based in London. Dr Marisa Mason is the Chief Executive and Ian Martin is the Chair of the Trustees. The organisation started from a pilot study of mortality associated with anaesthesia in five regions in England, Wales and Scotland published in 1982. A joint venture was established between surgery and anaesthesia named the Confidential Enquiry into Perioperative Deaths. It became the National Confidential Enquiry into Perioperative Deaths (NCEPOD) in 1988 and published its first report in 1990. It now covers all specialities and covers all outcomes as well as deaths.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inhalation sedation</span>

Inhalation sedation is a form of conscious sedation where an inhaled drug should:

  1. Depress the central nervous system (CNS) to an extent that surgeons can operate with minimal physiological and psychological stress to the patient
  2. Modify the patient's state of mind such that communication is maintained and the patient can respond to verbal command
  3. Carry a margin of safety wide enough to render the unintended loss of consciousness and loss of protective reflexes unlikely.

The Nursing & Health Care School, University of Glasgow, is a speciality area within the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Nursing in Glasgow, Scotland. The School has offered a degree course in Nursing since 1977, introduced under the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the time, Professor Edward McGirr.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Coulthard</span> British Scientist and Dentist

Paul Coulthard, BDS, MFGDP(UK), MDS, FDSRCS(Eng), FDSRCS(OS), PhD, FDSRCPS(Glas), FFDTRCS(Ed), FDSRCS(Ed), FCGDent is a British Academic Surgeon and Scientist.

References

  1. "Professor Jason Leitch - gov.scot". www.gov.scot. Retrieved 29 November 2018.
  2. 1 2 "Fletcher of Saltoun Awards". Saltire Society.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Peterkin, Tom (27 March 2020). "PROFILE: Jason Leitch, the professor who took on Piers Morgan and is providing some of the clearest advice on the coronavirus crisis". Press and Journal.
  4. "Interview: Scotland's national clinical director Jason Leitch on changing culture in healthcare". Holyrood Magazine. 19 September 2018. Retrieved 29 November 2018.
  5. Durent, Jamie (16 January 2021). "Jason Leitch urges caution to ensure Scottish sports' seasons can finish". Evening Express. Retrieved 21 January 2021.
  6. "Scotland's National Clinical Director on 'herd immunity', testing and how the country is tackling coronavirus". Channel 4 News. 16 March 2020.
  7. Hill, Rose (16 March 2020). "Piers Morgan rages after clinical director says wife went to see Stereophonics". Irish Mirror.
  8. "Jason Leitch | MDDUS". MDDUS. Retrieved 29 November 2018.
  9. "HFMA Awards 2011". www.hfma.org.uk. Retrieved 29 November 2018.
  10. "No. 62666". The London Gazette (Supplement). 8 June 2019. p. B9.