Ian Harper graduated from the prestigious Royal Military Academy Sandhurst Army in 1979 and was ranked in the top 5% of 650 students in his year. Assigned to the Infantry where he quickly developed and honed his skills in personnel management, training and development, business continuity planning, risk management and security planning. After 16 years of military life moved to the private sector initially completing a full time MBA, graduating top with distinction, proving his outstanding strategic, marketing and operational management capability and skills.

Over a 9 year period, he gained significant experience in the private sector in marketing, branding, preparing proposals and recruitment. Notably, he spent 18 months as a consultant working for the British Forces Germany Health Commission to maximise the £54m budget for healthcare services for a population at risk of 54,000 spread across Western Europe. During which, Ian helped to deliver over £11m in efficiencies through tighter secondary care management and contracting based on a bespoke data base he wrote and his analysis following deep data mining. He developed the communications strategy in support of the change management process for the Health Commission.

Ian re-joined the Army in 2002 as a Medical Planning Officer and assigned to the Ministry of Defence (Whitehall) as part of a six-man strategic medical planning group to develop and deliver the strategic restructure of Healthcare for the whole of Defence, covering 250,000 personnel spread across the globe and a budget of around £600m. His role included defining and articulating the performance criteria and management plans, managing the project and risk plan, producing management board reports and the overall communication strategy and plans for stakeholder engagement. He was further responsible for managing 11 projects under the Defence Heath Change Programme.

Ian was promoted and assigned as the head of corporate strategic planning for the Joint Medical Command, an organisation responsible for 8500 healthcare professionals and a budget of £148m. Here he restructured and more tightly aligned the performance management, risk and reporting system having for the first time, clearly defining the corporate objectives for the organisation on behalf of the Chief Executive. He led the organisation’s restructure and re-branding and project managed the relocation and streamlining of 3 strategic head offices from London, Oxford and Gosport to the Midlands. He wrote and executed the communications strategy for the whole strategic change programme. Further, he was the lead author in researching and witting the Manpower strategy for Defence Medicine, re-defining the training pathway for general surgeons and authoring the paper that improved the health outcomes for complex battlefield injuries through forward deployment and cross speciality team working of plastic surgeons.

Ian has deployed twice on active service to Afghanistan, the first as the Deputy Medical Director in Helmand Province responsible for managing 5 hospitals and over 20 medical centres supporting 48,000 combat troops, which expanded by at least 30% to include Afghan civilians. During this time, he identified the need for and successfully ran a non-literate environmental health campaign to reduce sickness rates amongst the Afghan police and Army. During this time, he demonstrated comfort at working across ethic cultures using his diplomacy skills by effectively developing very strong relationships with the heads of medicine for the regional Afghan Police and Army, at a level not previously done. This required Ian placing himself at considerable personal risk. During this time, he also negotiated with the Camp Bastion (the size of Reading) base commander an innovative approach to improve ambulance response times, which included crossing a live and active runway as well as being the driving force to deliver a coherent and coordinated ambulance service in the wider Helmand Valley servicing an Afghan population of 3 million. The second time he deployed to Afghanistan he demonstrated his versatility by running the communications campaign of the UK forces during the last critical 6 months of military operations in Afghanistan involving considerable cross Government liaison and collaboration.

Ian is married to a Tania who is a consultant Plastic Surgeon, Consultant Advisor to the Army, a key note speaker at International Conferences and faculty head for two major national clinical training faculties. His two children are at University and studying subjects aligned to healthcare.

Education / Membership of Professional Institutes

MBA (Distinction)

MA Management (Distinction)

MSc HRD (Distinction)

MA Marketing (Distinction)

Post Graduate Diploma – Operations Management

Member of City & Guilds (level 7) – MA equivalent

Fellow – Royal Society of Public Health

Fellow – Chartered Management Institute

Fellow – Chartered Institute of Marketing

Fellow – Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development

Fellow – Institute of Healthcare Management