Professor of International Child Health, University of Oxford and KEMRI-Wellcome Programme; UK

Mike English is a UK trained paediatrician who worked in Kenya for 25 years as part of the KEMRI-Wellcome Nairobi Programme supported by a series of Wellcome fellowships. In Kenya he built up the Health Services Unit working with Ministry of Health, the University of Nairobi, multiple county hospitals and a wide set of national and international collaborators. Mike now co-leads the Health Systems Collaborative in Oxford. 

In Kenya Mike established the Kenyan Clinical Information Network (CIN) in 2013 and further developed this platform over 10 years as an example of a low-cost learning health system to implement evidence-based practices, support large scale improvement interventions and conduct large pragmatic clinical trials and observational studies in Africa. From a base in Oxford Mike co-led the HIGH-Q project to examine quality of neonatal care in Kenya, how technologies are used, families experiences of care and how health workforce factors influence these. Mike co-leads a new long-term project on the future of the African First Referral Hospital (the AFRHiCARE Partnership) with a continued focus on quality of care, technologies and the health workforce. 

New collaborations are helping to extend work to Vietnam, Burundi, India, UK and Ghana with a strong focus on capacity building of LMIC scientists linked to the launch of a new MSc in Health Services Improvement and Evaluation (HSIE).