About Us – Meet the Team

Virginia is the Transformation Partner at The Jubilee Street Practice in East London. The rest of the time, Virginia sits on the board of the Tower Hamlets CCG, where she leads on urgent, emergency and primary care. To complement her commissioning role, Virginia is also a board member of the Tower Hamlets GP Care Group, a provider federation of 36 practices. EQUIP was initially set up and designed by a small team which included Virginia, who now acts as engagement lead for the programme, exercising and testing innovation in her own practice before suggesting at scale initiatives.

Virginia has led nationally on the campaign to address contractual GP funding cuts through the removal of the Minimum Practice Income Guarantee (MPIG), and on raising the profile of deprived boroughs through an evidence-based analysis of workload, disease burden and complexity. When Virginia is not lobbying NHS England, she is working with them to facilitate the lateral spread of innovation and established good practice, creating an environment in which innovators can come together to problem-solve common issues. Virginia’s professional passion is Quality Improvement in primary care, and bottom-up leadership models such as holocracy – Virginia thinks everyone has a genuine hero inside. To share best practice and try to spread QI culture in general practice at scale, Virginia is also part of the London Primary Care Academy.

In her spare time, Virginia loves eating and cooking, and in 2013 took a photo of everything she ate for one year, building a blog called “Eating the Year”. This was almost of more interest to the media than the removal of MPIG: http://eatingtheyear.blogspot.co.uk/

Tom lives and works as a GP in Tower Hamlets. His obsession with Quality Improvement began after mapping the process of buying a coffee in Pret vs Cafe Nero (try it!). This led to work with NHS Improving Quality and latterly the NHSE Sustainable Improvement Team, supporting national projects including CCG development, the GP Access Fund and .

Since 2016 he has been clinical lead on the Tower Hamlets EQUIP programme and honing his QI skills as an Improvement Advisor. The EQUIP programme uses QI methodology, team coaching and live operational data to support practice teams in unpicking day-to-day problems and getting joy back in their working day.

Adele’s passion for coaching is blooming, being part of the EQUIP Coaching Faculty, and providing coaching sessions at the NHS London Leadership Academy, as well as coaching primary care teams.

Her dedication to healthcare started in 2013, when her father fell critically ill. Since then, she has packed away her masters in finance, quit the banking world and moved into nanotechnology and IT Solutions applied to healthcare.

Adele spent three years working in clinical trials funded by the European Commission, living across Italy, Austria and the UK. Adele believes that we need to create solutions rather than overcoming obstacles. Innovation is the means for a better, holistic healthcare service.

In the UK, she has led several projects in mental health and urgent care. The collaboration with several start-ups, research centres and secondary care providers made clear to her that the core of the health care is the family doctor, since the patient’s journey commences here. For this reason, Adele joined the Primary Care at WEL CCG.

Being a firm believer in personal development and continuous professional development, Adele is an ICF qualified Coach and in the process to get qualified as Improvement Coach with NHS ELFT.

In her spare time, Adele runs her coaching business, meant to enable expats who want to build a real home far from their home country, and to individuals struggling with their very first home: their body and confidence in themselves.

By training, Vyoma is a dentist. After practicing for a year in India she aspired to open her own dental clinic. She came London to pursue a Master’s degree in Healthcare Management to support making her aspiration a reality.

Alongside her Masters, Vyoma interned at Barts Health NHS Trust. She spent majority of her time working on a quality improvement project aimed to improve the Health and Well-being of employees at St.Bartholomew’s Hospital. This is when things took a turn and she became really passionate about Quality Improvement and staff well-being which drove her to join the EQUIP team.

After completing the NHS Graduate Management Training Scheme, Sindbad joined the EQUIP team to have a greater impact at what is often the first stage of a patient’s contact with the healthcare system during their pathway. Sindbad is passionate about improving staff and patient experience and a huge advocate of utilising data, not only to provide an accurate depiction of systems and process but also to create recommendations for improvement initiatives.

When not looking at spreadsheets, he enjoys anything to do with fitness and travelling.

Joseph joined EQUIP to improve the health services in his local area of East London, having grown up in Hackney. His academic background began with Physics but he realised he preferred people to particles so chose to make the change to Economics.

In his spare time Joseph enjoys reading philosophy and enjoying hearing hot takes on the NBA and NFL.