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Dr Bharat Pankhania has widespread experience of advising on national communicable disease control action plans at national and international level. Having had experience of both Primary and Secondary Care, Dr Pankhania realised that to make a bigger contribution to people`s health, primary prevention of illness was important, thus he trained in Public Health Medicine and thereafter did further training in infectious diseases and Communicable Disease Control.

Dr Pankhania’s experience includes:

Pandemic Influenza outbreak planning and major plan testing exercises. He was the local Lead for Pandemic Influenza planning at Public Health England and became the reference point for outbreak planning, testing systems and control strategies.

Ebola and SARS: Dr Pankhania was immersed in and contributed to the Ebola and SARS surveillance and control methodologies, specialist screening methods at ports of entry.

Tuberculosis: Dr Pankhania became an expert in investigating clusters of Tuberculosis and using newly developed tools. Investigations and controlling TB outbreaks in schools, hospitals and prisons.

Legionella: Dr Pankhania has led on and was the Legionella lead in his previous job. He investigated complex outbreaks, advised hospitals and hotels and also developed expertise in the health and safety law relating to Legionella.

Dr Kev Smith is Regional Director Public Health Commissioning for NHS England, North East and Yorkshire. He has been the principal advisor to the NHS in the region throughout the height of the COVID pandemic advising the NHS Executive team and system leaders on the likely impact on NHS services.

Upon leaving secondary school, Bret worked in the civil service and eventually took himself to Leeds University. After leaving with a master’s degree in chemistry, he then gained entry into Bart’s and The London Medical School, an enjoyable time with a memorable stint with the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany, as part of his medical elective. After qualifying as a medical doctor, he then worked in hospital-based medicine for 4 years, mainly working in emergency medicine and care of the elderly.

His hospital experience reinforced the maxim of ‘prevention is better than cure’. Most of the cases he dealt with, especially in emergency medicine, were wholly preventable. The most surprising aspect was that most of these cases had no idea of the basic life changes they needed to make in order to improve their health for the long term. During training as a specialist public health doctor, he studied a Master’s in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and gained by CCT in Public Health in 2016. He then decided that in order to do front line public health work, he'd step back to do Genitourinary medicine (GUM) training. I CCT in GUM and HIV medicine in 2020.

Dr Smita Kapadia is a Consultant in Communicable Disease Control working within the UKHSA’s East of England Health Protection Team, where she leads the Healthcare Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance workstream.

Smita trained in India as well as the East of England and qualified as a consultant in 2011; she has over 15 years of communicable disease control experience and understands the challenges of controlling infectious diseases in resource-limited contexts.

Smita led the East of England Health Protection Team’s COVID Response Cell. One of her current areas of focus is the ongoing Group A streptococcus situation.