I’m David. I’ve worked in healthcare for 23 years: emergency nursing, ten years as a nurse practitioner in urgent care, then quality, patient safety and system operations at an Integrated Care Board. I’m still NMC-registered. I left the NHS in June 2026 and I’m looking for roles in healthcare AI, data, informatics or strategic operations, within reach of Nottingham.
How I got here
As a child I liked taking things to bits, and sometimes putting them back together. We got an Acorn Electron in 1983, and though I enjoyed playing Chuckie Egg, I could never get interested in coding. I found it too abstract and a bit boring.
I started training as a manufacturing engineer, didn’t much enjoy 20+ hours of maths a week, and switched to psychology after a year. After a while not really knowing what to do with myself, I trained as a nurse and started in a small but busy ED in north London. I then worked at a private international school, coached its rowing team and spent a couple of years as a medic with the TA. I got pretty good with spreadsheets.
Back in the NHS I worked in major trauma, then spent ten years training and working as a nurse practitioner, latterly running a clinic in Notting Hill. Somewhere along the way I’d become the go-to person for any and all IT problems. Can’t figure out your spreadsheet formula? Need a database query? Printer not working? Dave is your man. I was more interested in computers than I’d realised.
After COVID we moved to the East Midlands and I joined the local ICB, first in Quality with a focus on urgent care, then operations and resilience, finishing in the System Coordination Centre. It taught me how healthcare works as a system: leadership, influencing, mountains of data, equity, systems thinking. It’s also where I got hooked on AI, during the NHS pilot of Microsoft 365 Copilot, mostly by trying to get it to do bits of my job.
So I’m a nerd, and a generalist rather than a specialist, though I go deep on whatever catches my interest: urgent care, spreadsheets, systems thinking, and now AI. This site has some of my work from that last year in the NHS, and what I’ve built with AI since.