Joining the dots
Between our core team, trusted associates and strategic partners we have a strong commercial approach from people with real business leadership and transformational backgrounds, with access to world leading analytics and media capabilities. We recognise the need to balance commercial reality with the often conflicting needs of complex stakeholders.
We pride ourselves on pragmatic, usable and hands on support and insight.
Andy Ward
MBA BSc CEng
Managing Director and Lead Client Advisor
WHi Consulting is led by Andy Ward - he's a well-established and versatile executive and leader, with a track record of building, managing and improving businesses in new and established markets. Specialising in healthcare, technology and lifesciences, his work over the last fifteen years has seen him run businesses in Multi National Corporations, and work with national and regional governments, healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies on areas such as strategy and policy implementation, cost reduction, efficiency and productivity improvements, and patient pathway and flow optimisation. Andy is often a trusted client advisor and regularly acts embedded in organisations to accelerate the business change commissioned. His international experience spans UK, Australia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the US.
Andy's career history spans large and small companies, and technology, healthcare and life sciences. Before founding WHi Consulting in 2014, he led GE Healthcare's consulting business in the UK - which specialised in business transformation, operational excellence and leadership development. He was part of the global leadership of that business and instrumental in its redefinition as a trusted advisor to healthcare leaders around the world and growth to scale through acquisition. Before GE he was a leader in Deloitte's London consulting practice with interests in Programme Leadership and Healthcare Transformation. In the early to mid 2000's, Andy led a variety of consulting engagements in PA Consulting, initially working in Lifesciences on developing and implementing new organisational models to deliver ambitious strategies for clients. His most significant work there saw him lead client work in the UK, Australia and the Middle East that saw him open business and lead teams that translated strategies and polices for better value, better quality and higher access health provider services. Andy's career prior to consulting was in product development of Analytical Instrumentation at PerkinElmer Inc and in space simulation for the boutique science consulting firm T-S Space Systems.
This rich experience, coupled with a hands on style, means WHi can be highly versatile in working with organisations to achieve a business outcome or overcome hurdles to growth or programme delivery. Recent advisory work includes developing an international commercialisation strategy for a UK Government body, designing and implementing a new organisational model for a leading technology solutions company – while embedded within the company’s executive team, and working with a MNC in Australia to market test and set up a healthcare solutions and leadership solutions business, and support making it sustainable.
Andy is an accredited practitioner of TEIQue Emotional Intelligence and DISC Behavioural Inventories and regularly coaches teams and executives. In 2019 Andy was a judge for the Institute of Directors 2019 National Awards. Andy is also co-founder of med-tech start-up ideation.AI www.ideationAI.com and co-chair of UKIHMA, The UK International Healthcare Management Association
Wendy Cookson
Wendy is a degree nurse with an MBA who has worked in healthcare for over 25 years. Over the past 6 years as an independent advisor, she has successfully directed acute and mental health Trusts out of CQC regulatory non-compliance. She is an expert in clinical and corporate governance and risk and is a national reviewer of Foundation Trusts against the ‘Well-Led’ framework with Grant Thornton. A large part of this work is ensuring assurance within organisations and externally with regulators and multiple stakeholders from patients to councillors.
Wendy also has expansive knowledge and experience in transformational change in the public and private health sectors, at operational, commissioning, strategic and regional level in the UK, and recently as an advisor on major trauma status to a hospital group in Ireland. Wendy is the clinical Non-Executive Director in one of the largest Trusts in the UK and is a Trustee of a community charity in her home borough of Bermondsey.
Professor Michelle Russell
Michelle has 25 years’ business experience designing and implementing leadership development and culture change programs with leading organisations across a global landscape: in ANZ, across Asia, the UK and across Europe, the Gulf Region, and the Americas. She draws upon rich and diverse career experience, which is a blend of senior, internal-facing Organisation and Executive Development roles, and externally, in senior consulting roles for GE Healthcare Partners and Accenture.
In her Professor of Practice role of Monash Business School in Melbourne, she facilitates a variety of subjects that support organisational and personal transformation. As Director of Executive Education, she works with organisations to design and implement bespoke, practical programs that embrace the workplace disruptions businesses face today, and works hand-in-hand with clients to build their individual and organisational capability to future-proof their businesses.
Michelle holds a Bachelor of Science in Business from CSU, Sacramento, with minors in French and German, and she is fluent in French. She has also studied at the HEC at the Université de Montréal, Canada, and Columbia University in New York City.
Paul White
Paul is a highly experienced executive and management consultant with a deep understanding of the challenges currently facing healthcare based upon 15 years’ experience in the sector. Paul’s style is to work collaboratively with senior managers and his operational experience is centred on appropriate strategic decision making (providing challenge and support where necessary) backed up by a detailed understanding of data and evidence.
Paul has worked in Australia, the UK, Europe and USA bringing a wealth of knowledge of different operating models and cultures across healthcare. He has an excellent academic background (1st Class Degree, University of Oxford) and he has delivered executive and clinical leadership development and presentations at national and international events.
Our Strategic Partners
Making life easier for clinicians and care better for patients
ideation.AI applies accepted research methodologies to solve clearly defined everyday problems using trusted datasets, publish statistically relevant models and supply algorithms as containerised software to reduce clinician cognitive burden
Save the life of someone you love
Fixing Dad Ltd is a UK-based international TV and digital content production company set up on the back of the success of their flagship show, Fixing Dad, the BBC acclaimed story about one father’s extraordinary battle with Type 2 diabetes and how his two sons helped reverse it ... and how their success now offers hope to millions.
They offer production of original content, including Fixing Us, and licensing services to partners and sponsors as part of our international journey to help make it easier for all families to succeed in tackling and reversing Type 2 diabetes and other conditions, such as Cardio Vascular Disease and Mental Health, including the licensing of new and existing content, international distribution, sponsorship, partnerships and events.