He is a researcher, writer, teacher and lecturer on services for older people and a regular blogger, columnist and media commentator.
In April 2022 he was elected as president of the Royal College of Physicians but withdrew in July 2022 after he had contracted Covid 19 and "no longer felt able to do it justice".
He then attended Manchester Grammar School[2] before studying medicine at The Queen's College, Oxford and Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
He was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Health and Social care at the University of Reading from 2004 to 2009 alongside his consultant contract at the Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust.
[8] In his government role he developed national policies around the care of older people, advised Ministers and officials and provided assistance to other clinicians with their own local services.
[10] In 2014, he was the lead author of the keynote Kings Fund Paper "Making Health and Care Systems fit for an Ageing Population".
[19] He has criticised the large NHS spend on management consultancy [20] and pushed the case for NHS staff to learn more from other organisations within the NHS,[21] criticised the idea that more aggressive regulation and inspection and "accountability" can bring about quality improvement in services [22] and attacked contestible but prevalent "groupthink" and oft repeated "factoids" from the health policy "commentariat" [23] and made the case for improving the care for older people in nursing homes rather than pretending no-one will ever need or want to be admitted to one.