Nigel Edwards

Nigel Edwards is an independent health policy expert working as an advisor with WHO and a number of UK organisations on health policy planning and change management. Nigel was Chief Executive at the Nuffield Trust from 2013 to 2023.  He has a long career in health policy and working on innovation and change in healthcare delivery and in providing challenging analysis on health policy.  He has a strong interest in using different disciplines to inform health policy.

He has worked for the King’s Fund, KPMG’s global health practice and the NHS Confederation where he was Director of Policy for 11 years.  Prior to that he worked at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he remains an honorary visiting professor.   He is also an Honorary Professor at the Health Services Management Centre at Birmingham University.

He started his professional life as a graduate trainee in NHS management and worked at hospital and regional level following this. Nigel works across a range of issues from new models of service delivery, primary care, local health strategy and on wider health care policy in the UK and internationally.  Most recently this has included reviewing the strategies for developing a teaching hospital and a rural health system in Wales, , developing a vision for community pharmacy.  For WHO he has supported the European Centre for Primary Health Care in a number of pieces of work including the development of primary care in rural Georgia, primary care in Spain and integrate systems in Portugal.  He also works with WHO regional Office for Europe on hospital policy and planning.  He has contributed to the work of the Observatory for over 20 years contributing to policy dialogues, assisting in the editing of two books and the development of policy briefs, most recently on emergency care and hospital policy. 

Articles:

Shaping the vision: strategic hospital transformation within WHO European Region health systems, WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2025

Williams W, Fisher E and Edwards N, Bold action or slow decay? The state of NHS dentistry and future policy actions. Policy briefing, Nuffield Trust, 2023

Edwards N, Black S, Targets: unintended and unanticipated effects, BMJ Quality & Safety 2023;32:697-699