John – Chief Executive Officer

Tell us about your role and what you do within Cohese Healthcare

As Chief Executive my role is to lead the organisation, working with the wider Board of Directors (Executive and Non Executives) to determine the future direction of travel for the company. Our future success is reliant on gaining commitment to our vision with you as colleagues internally in Cohese Healthcare and with our external stakeholders such as Commissioners; GPs; NHS Trusts and other partners. Much of my work is therefore about communication and engagement and promoting what we do – I can do so confidently as 99% of patients rating our services as very good or good it’s clear evidence that we provide high quality services.

What do you like most about your role?

I feel proud to lead the organisation and work with such committed staff. The service models we have are the solution to many of the pressures on the NHS, particularly patients waiting too long for treatment. Our growth ambitions are therefore about providing more services to more people because we know what we do makes a genuine difference to peoples’ lives. I enjoy the variety of my work and no two days are the same – this aligns to my motto on life of: ‘never a dull moment!’

Tell us something interesting about yourself that most of us won’t know

Despite my accent, I was born in Northern Ireland in a town called Ballymena which is where the actor Liam Neeson is from and use to live next door to his sister. When we moved over to England, I retained my roots by doing irish dancing and my Mum proudly still has my medals! Unfortunately, I gave up just a couple of years before Michael Flatley made irish dancing so popular through Riverdance. I am known to get up and do a bit of irish dancing still, particularly when Ireland win the 6 Nations Rugby competition which is fairly often!