RCP: New Head of SEQOHS appointed

Wednesday, 31 August 2011 4:52 PM

SEQOHS, the accreditation system for occupational health services, has appointed Dr Sally Coomber to the post of Clinical Lead.

Sally Coomber is Director of Suffolk Occupational Health for The Ipswich Hospital NHS Trust. The SEQOHS post is part time and so Sally will continue in her role with the Trust, where she is clinical leader of a multidisciplinary team. Sally is a Fellow of the Faculty of Occupational Medicine and of the Royal College of Physicians. She is Regional Specialty Adviser for the Faculty of Occupational Medicine and the Clinical Lead for ‘The Wellbeing Project’ at Ipswich Hospital. Sally was previously also a Consultant Occupational Physician at Addenbrookes NHS Trust.

SEQOHS has concluded its development phase and has become fully operational. There are now 160 occupational health services registered for SEQOHS accreditation and the first seven certificates of accreditation were presented by Dame Carol Black in July, with a further service being accredited since then.

Dr Sally Coomber said: ‘I have great admiration for SEQOHS and for the ambition it represents – to encourage high standards of care in occupational health services across the UK, and beyond. I bring to this post a strong interest in evaluation of clinical services and in demonstrating effectiveness. I am very pleased to have this opportunity to be playing a significant part in the improvement of service quality. I look forward to leading SEQOHS and to working with colleagues to make a real contribution to its ongoing success.‘

Faculty of Occupational Medicine President, Dr Olivia Carlton said: ‘I am delighted to be welcoming Sally to this post. I know she will bring tremendous leadership skills to SEQOHS. I must take this opportunity to thank Dr Paul Nicholson, who led on the development phase of the standards for occupational health service and the SEQOHS accreditation system. Paul laid very solid foundations for the scheme and I know Sally will be building on these and will be taking SEQOHS forward with great commitment into its next phase.‘

Notes to Editors

For further information and to arrange interviews, please contact Faculty of Occupational Medicine CEO Nicky Coates on 020 3116 6906 nicky.coates@facoccmed.ac.uk or RCP PR Manager Linda Cuthbertson on 020 3075 1254, linda.cuthbertson@rcplondon.ac.uk.
More information about SEQOHS and the accreditation process can be found on the SEQOHS website www.seqohs.org

SEQOHS - Safe Effective Quality Occupational Health Service – is an accreditation system for occupational health services. It is run by the Royal College of Physicians on behalf of the Faculty of Occupational Medicine. By meeting these standards, occupational health services are able to maintain and improve the quality of people’s health while in work.

SEQOHS aims to:

• enable services to identify the standards of practice to which they should aspire
• credit good work being done by high quality occupational health services, providing independent validation that they satisfy standards of quality
• raise standards where they need to be raised
• help purchasers differentiate occupational health services that attain the desired standards from those that do not

Linda Cuthbertson
PR Manager
Royal College of Physicians
11 St Andrews Place
Regent's Park
London NW1 4LE
Tel: 020 3075 1254, 07748 777919
Out of hours: 07896 416409 

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• health