Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland
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Speakers

Area: Health and Social Care Alliance Scotland
Annual Conference 2025 logo reading 'Our Voices Matter' and featuring graphics of speech bubbles, a person, building, a placard, a megaphone, and an open book.

Read about our chair and the variety of speakers that will be at our annual conference on 30 April 2025.

Chair

Pennie Taylor, Journalist and broadcaster

Pennie is an award-winning freelance journalist and broadcaster who specialises in health and care issues. A passionate promoter of innovation, she was BBC Scotland’s first Health Correspondent and has also worked on the news desks of a number of national newspapers. A former Head of Communications for a large NHS Trust, Pennie has inside knowledge of how public services work, giving her an informed perspective from which to approach and stimulate debate. 

Speakers

Professor Sir Michael Marmot

Sir Michael Marmot is a leading expert on health inequalities and social determinants of health and has authored several books and reports, including ‘The Health Gap’ (2015), ‘Status Syndrome’ (2004) and the Marmot Review, an independent review to propose the most effective evidence-based strategies for reducing health inequalities in England from 2010. He has been Professor of Epidemiology at University College London since 1985, and is the Advisor to the WHO Director-General on social determinants of health in the new WHO Division of Healthier Populations.

He has accepted honorary doctorates from 18 universities and has led research groups on health inequalities for nearly 50 years. He chaired the Commission on Equity and Health Inequalities in the Americas, set up in 2015 by the World Health Organization’s Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO/ WHO). He was Chair of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), which was set up by the World Health Organization in 2005, and produced the report entitled: ‘Closing the Gap in a Generation’ in August 2008. At the request of the British Government, he conducted the Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England post 2010, which published its report ‘Fair Society, Healthy Lives’ in February 2010. This was followed by the European Review of Social Determinants of Health and the Health Divide, for WHO EURO in 2014, and in 2020 Health Equity in England: Marmot Review 10 Years On, and Build Back Fairer: the COVID-19 Marmot Review. 

Further speakers to be announced soon.

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