RCPCH appoints CEO and elects new president

CEO Professor Judith Ellis MBE is to retire on 31 May, 2018 after nearly four successful years at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Judith will be succeeded by Jo Revill, who will join the RCPCH on 1 June.

Jo has had an extensive career working for the Evening Standard and the Observer newspapers as both health and political correspondent and then as adviser to Alan Johnson when he was health secretary and home secretary. She subsequently worked as strategic communications director at the Royal College of Surgeons before joining the British Society for Immunology. She is the author of two books on allergies and bird flu.

Professor Russell Viner has been elected as the next RCPCH President. Professor Viner is an academic paediatrician and adolescent physician at the University College London Institute of Child Health, working clinically in paediatric and adolescent diabetes at University College Hospital. Until recently, he was Clinical Director for Children and Young People in Healthy London Partnerships. He is the Director of the Department of Health Obesity Policy Research Unit, an National Institutes Health Research Senior Investigator, and has worked as a consultant for the Departments of Health and of Education in the UK, for Public Health England and for the World Health Oraganization internationally. He was the senior editor of the RCPCH's State of Child Health Report 2017 and is currently the RCPCH Officer for Health Promotion. He will take up the role on 14 March, and serve three years. Until then, he will sit on the council and trustee board as President Elect.

The new Vice President for Education and Professional Development has also been elected. Dr Camilla Kingdon, a consultant neonatologist at Guy's at St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and Evelina London, will commence her role in July.