Professor Sir Chris Whitty to speak at CHA National Conference 2026

We are delighted to confirm that Professor Sir Chris Whitty, Chief Medical Officer for England, will join the CHA National Conference as a plenary speaker on Thursday 7th May.

Professor Sir Chris Whitty will speak remotely on this year's conference theme, Community Hospitals: Integrating Care, Building Capacity, and will take questions from delegates.

Professor Sir Chris Whitty has previously spoken about the value of community hospitals, describing them as an essential part of provision for both inpatient and outpatient care for many citizens in England and the wider UK. His perspective on their role within the NHS 10 Year Plan and the shift towards neighbourhood-based care will resonate with everyone who works in or alongside community hospital services.

His session takes place on the morning of day one, alongside a full programme of plenary speakers, workshops, the Innovation and Best Practice Awards and the networking dinner.

Dr Mary Miller

Consultant in Palliative Medicine; Director, OxCERPC; Clinical Lead, NACEL

Plenary title: What does the national audit tell us about care of the dying in community hospitals?

Background: Community hospitals audit the care they provide to dying patients. They contribute approximately 10% of all data collected about the care of those dying in hospitals in England, Wales and Jersey.  I will discuss how care compares with care delivered in acute and mental health hospitals.

Dr Mary Miller FRCP is a Consultant in Palliative Medicine at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Director of the Oxford Centre for Education and Research in Palliative Care (OxCERPC), and Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer in Palliative Medicine at the University of Oxford. She is the Clinical Lead for the National Audit of Care at the End of Life (NACEL), delivered through NHS Benchmarking. Mary trained in medicine at University College Cork and has worked in palliative medicine in Ireland, Sweden and the UK. Alongside her clinical practice, she has a long standing commitment to education and professional development, with a focus on supporting high quality end of life care.

Listen to a recent podcast about NACEL here 

Ellen Rule

Chief Executive, Herefordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care

Plenary title: From Community Hospitals to Neighbourhood Health: A Strategic Reset

Executive summary

Community hospitals have spent decades justifying their existence. The emergence of neighbourhood health policy offers a pivotal opportunity to redefine their purpose and value. In a system like Herefordshire and Worcestershire – serving around 800,000 people across a large, rural footprint with an ageing population and limited transport – traditional hospital‑centric models are increasingly inefficient. If neighbourhood health cannot work here, it is unlikely to work anywhere.

Neighbourhood health policy is no longer aspirational; it sets clear expectations for shifting care from hospitals to communities, from reactive treatment to prevention, and from organisational silos to integrated neighbourhood teams. Community hospitals are neither explicitly protected nor replaced by this agenda, but they are implicitly challenged: remain small, sub‑scale replicas of acute care? or evolve into essential neighbourhood assets?

This talk argues that community hospitals can become neighbourhood health platforms – anchoring integrated neighbourhood teams, enabling out‑of‑hospital diagnostics and consultant outreach, hosting prevention and voluntary sector partnerships, and supporting digital and home‑based care at scale. For systems, the strategic choice is clear: stabilise the status quo, or redesign community hospitals as engines of neighbourhood health. The future will be shaped not by policy alone, but by leadership and communities that are willing to let these trusted local institutions evolve.

Ellen Rule joined Herefordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust as Chief Executive in May 2025. She brings significant system leadership experience from her previous role as Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Strategy and Transformation in Gloucestershire.

Ellen has a strong track record of collaborative working across health, care and the voluntary and community sector. Her work has focused on service improvement and redesign alongside clinicians, professionals and patients, with a consistent emphasis on prevention, integrated person centred care and supporting people to maintain independence.