We invite thought leaders from around the world to be plenary speakers at the Quality Forum so they can share their unique knowledge and health care quality experience with our audience. Meet them below!

Below you’ll find information from Quality Forum 2023. Be sure to add Quality Forum 2024 to your calendar and make sure you are subscribed to our newsletter so you don’t miss out on Quality Forum 2024 updates.

Jim Easton has been an executive in the healthcare system in England for over 25 years.

He has held leadership positions in hospital services, mental health, primary care and national policy.

He was the Chief Executive of York Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, a high performing 700 bed hospital in the north of England.

He held the Chief Executive position for the South Central Strategic Health Authority, where he was responsible for the delivery of all healthcare services for a population of 5 million people in the south of England.

In 2009 Jim took on the role of National Director of Transformation for the National Health Service (NHS) in England, responsible, amongst other areas, for the programme to deliver £20b of efficiency savings whilst improving quality across the whole range of NHS services nationally. He was also the national NHS Director responsible for the development of the 111 number.  When he left this role at the end of 2012 the National Audit Office independently assessed that the first three years of the  programme had successfully delivered its challenging objectives.

In February 2013 Jim took up post as the Chief Executive of Health for Care UK, a large privately owned provider of health care services to the NHS in England, providing around £400m of surgical, primary care and urgent care services to the NHS.  Care UK is innovating in new models of primary care and elective surgery across England and has rebranded on 01 October 2020 to The Practice Plus Group.

Throughout his career, Jim has had a deep interest in the application of quality improvement approaches to the delivery of improved quality and value of healthcare services, and the role of leaders in achieving such improvement.  He is regularly asked to speak nationally and internationally on these issues.

Cormac is a social explorer, an author and a much sought-after speaker. He is the Founding Director of Nurture Development and a member of the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute, at DePaul University, Chicago. Over the last 25 years, Cormac’s work has demonstrated an enduring impact in 35 countries around the world. He has trained communities, agencies, NGOs and governments in ABCD and other community-based approaches in Africa, Asia, Australia/Oceania, Europe and North America.

His most recent books are The Connected Community- Discovering the Health, Wealth, and Power of Neighborhoods (Coauthor John McKnight); Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2022, and Rekindling Democracy – A Professional’s Guide to Working in Citizen Space; Cascade Books, 2020.

Cormac’s TEDx talk can be viewed here.

Sheri Fink is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated television producer and the author of the New York Times bestselling nonfiction book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital about choices made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She is a producer of the Five Days at Memorial limited series on Apple TV+.

Fink’s work has often explored the impact of crises on health care and is informed by her background as an MD and former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones (she also holds a PhD in neuroscience).
Five Days at Memorial, the recipient of eight book awards, was based on an article investigating patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center. Co-published by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, the article won both a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award.

As a news reporter, Fink extensively covered the Covid pandemic and, earlier, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, sharing Pulitzer Prizes in 2021 and 2015 with New York Times colleagues. Fink’s investigation into how the Ebola epidemic began in Sierra Leone and why it wasn’t stopped in time for the PBS Frontline episode Outbreak received an Emmy nomination for outstanding research in 2016.
Fink’s first foray into television producing was as a co-creator and an executive producer of the Emmy-nominated documentary television series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak (2020). Filmed the year prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, it featured the intertwining stories of scientists and doctors around the world fighting to stop the next outbreak. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival, is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Fink often lectures on topics ranging from emergency preparedness to journalism and is an adjunct associate professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She is at work on a book about the global Covid pandemic.