Professor Ian Cumming OBE talks Covid, healthcare overseas, and future global health challenges

The latest episode of The Keele Podcast has launched today, and features a fascinating interview with Professor Ian Cumming OBE from the School of Medicine, who played a key role in the response to the Covid pandemic in the UK's Overseas Territories. 

Ian speaks about his involvement in the Covid response, challenges and issues faced during that period, as well as successes and whether he thinks the world is now better prepared for future pandemics. 

“Obviously I knew that Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands and Bermuda weren’t the same, but if you look at the Caribbean area for example, where we’ve got Anguilla and Montserrat and British Virgin Islands, I would have assumed that they were all similar in terms of challenges facing their healthcare system because they’re close together geographically, but there’s nothing further from the truth, they each have their own issues, problems and challenges, and trying to approach them with the perspective that they’re the British Overseas Territories is fundamentally wrong.” 

Ian also speaks about future challenges he sees in global healthcare, and adaptations he believes should be made to the way we approach healthcare globally. You can hear more of his thoughts in this fascinating interview below.

“I often say I’ve spent my career working for the national sickness service rather than the health service. We diagnose and treat. We have got to move all our healthcare systems upstream and start looking at predicting and preventing rather than just diagnosing and treating.” 

As well as his work in the Overseas Territories, Ian is Professor of Global Healthcare, Workforce and Strategy at Keele, and is playing a significant role in the Keele Deal | Health as well as working with the Institute for Global Health to build international partnerships and educate students on healthcare systems of countries around the world.