Dr. Fran Woodard, Director, Cancer Programme, Integrated Cancer Centre, Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, and Sponsor/Lead for the Patient Centred Care Project, The King's Fund

Dr Fran Woodard is an experienced senior manager with extensive skills in directing, leading and delivering radical large-scale improvements, developing and evaluating complex services and aligning business objectives with improving quality, efficiency and productivity. She has delivered significant change in complex and highly politicised environments, and has experience of working at an operational, strategic, corporate and national level. Fran is firmly committed to modernisation, service improvement, leadership and organisational development, and has a special interest in the relationship between the development of leadership capacity and the resultant service improvement potential. She has a doctorate in ‘Leading Inter-organisational Change’, which focussed on the relationship between leadership and change when transforming services across organisational and professional boundaries. She undertakes lecturing and teaching across a wide range of disciplines, and mentors and coaches individuals from diverse professional backgrounds.

She is currently the Director of the Cancer Programme for the South-East London Integrated Cancer Centre (ICC). Her role is to lead the delivery of an internationally distinctive Comprehensive Cancer Centre that aspires to be amongst the top 10 globally. The ICC partners are Guy’s and St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trusts, and King’s College London, now joined as King’s Health Partners. This is a large-scale multi-organisational transformational programme incorporating the enhancement of clinical service delivery, integrating research and clinical practice to reduce the research pipeline and increase translational research, capital and information technology solutions, income diversification strategies and the delivery of patient centred care.
Before this, she was the Director of the Modernisation Initiative, a multi-agency project across the Lambeth and Southwark health economy, South-East London. The Modernisation Initiative was a complex change project, working across secondary and primary care and the voluntary and private sector. The outcome resulted in radically redesigned stroke, sexual health and kidney delivery models and service provision across the patient pathway from prevention to end of life care.

She worked for the Department of Health’s NHS Modernisation Agency. Her work included project directing the MA Change process - the closure of the MA and the establishment of the Institute of Innovation and Improvement and national lead for a range of clinical and leadership programmes and national service improvement projects.

Her early career was as a physiotherapist in the critical care field. She moved into research, clinical leadership and general management roles in NHS Trusts in London.