Board of Trustees
The Trustees of the Fellowship have a range of responsibilities to ensure the Fellowship follows charity law. They set the strategic direction for the charity in an unpaid role.
Our trustees
Mark Bailey, Chair
Mark is our new chair and will lead the Board of Trustees to guide the strategic direction of the charity and ensure the Fellowship meets its charitable objectives and has sustainable growth. He aims to promote a culture that is collaborative, innovative, and inclusive throughout and to represent the Fellowship at the highest level, engaging with stakeholders, funders and decision makers and act as an ambassador for the organisation, promoting good working relationships with existing and potential stakeholders.
Mark was born in Yorkshire and comes from an engineering and commercial business background with a thirty-year career with Rolls-Royce plc in the aerospace and power systems industry. Since the start of 2020 he has served as a non-executive director at Doncaster and Bassetlaw NHS Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust and has since also taken on a similar role at Derbyshire Community Health Services NHS Foundation Trust. More recently he was appointed as a trustee at the Ashgate Hospice in North Derbyshire. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Cranfield University School of Management and privately offers coaching and mentoring in the corporate environment, public sector as well as to business start-ups.
Mark lives in the market town of Ashbourne at the edge of the Peak District in Derbyshire with his wife and two young children and an older son who is away at university.
Gareth Oakland, Honorary Treasurer
Gareth is a trustee and the national treasurer of the Fellowship. He works with the chief executive and the chief operating officer to ensure the Fellowship makes prudent decisions about how money is raised and spent. He speaks regularly to branch treasurers when they need support or have questions about their role.
Gareth is a chartered accountant and was a partner in the public sector business of PricewaterhouseCoopers where he had many NHS and social care clients. He worked closely with the health regulators in the UK and abroad. After retirement, he returned to university where he studied for a doctorate in French history. He continues to research and write on 19th-century memorials and is often found cycling between his house in Bishop’s Stortford and libraries and archives in France.
Mark Bagnall
Mark is the lead trustee responsible for safeguarding. This is something he is passionate about and currently holds two part time posts delivering safeguarding training and managing the safeguarding process for a voluntary organisation.
Mark was a teacher and youth worker before he spent most of his working life as a trainer and tutor with the Methodist Church. Mark took early retirement a while back. He spends his time between photography, listening to jazz , his part time jobs and coming to terms with being a recent wheelchair user.
Janine Brooks
Janine is a trustee who is also a member of the Fellowship. She is currently a coach/mentor and lectures on a variety of topics, in addition to working for the General Dental Council as an assessment panellist.
She qualified from Birmingham Dental School in 1983 and began her clinical career in Herefordshire, then South Warwickshire before taking up a number of national jobs before retiring in 2011. She was awarded an MBE for services to dentistry in 2007.
Julia Hickey
Julia is an external trustee who joined the Fellowship in October 2023. She is a chartered accountant and sits on the Fellowship’s Audit Committee.
She has a wide range of non-executive experience in health, housing, education and probation. She lives in Gateshead and was on the board at Gateshead Health NHS Foundation Trust for many years, including over seven years as chair. She was also a board member of the NHS Confederation for several years.
David James
David is an external trustee who lives near Oxford and is also a trustee for the Keele Postgraduate Association that supports students at the University of Keele where David studied to be a lecturer in further education in the mid 1980s.
After leaving full time education David was a college and university lecturer teaching the ‘Sociology of Health’ until he joined the Commission for Health Improvement the then regulator for the NHS in England and Wales as a review manager. From 2007 David was a board/company secretary for a number of NHS hospitals in the west of London and since 2016 he has been a freelance governance advisor working in the public and charitable sectors.
Chris Kitchin
Chris has been a trustee since 2017. He is committed to helping the organisation develop, bringing to it experience in human resource management, disaster planning and change management in both primary and secondary health care. He has more recently served as vice chair and interim chair of the board. Chris has also had roles as a school governor, trustee and presiding magistrate.
Beverley Lawrence
Beverley has been chair of our branch in Newham, London, since 2012 and is now one of our trustees where her particular interests in interviewing for new roles and being part of the Audit Committee. Her presence on the Board has brought in diversity and inclusion.
Beverley joined the NHS in 1965 and qualified as a midwife in 1969. She held a number of positions from staff nurse to ward sister and included a stint working in Libya. She then became the only on site midwifery manager in a London teaching hospital. She subsequently spent 20 years working in the private sector and returned to the NHS for two years before retiring in 2011. She enjoys being a social butterfly, travelling, horse riding and the arts.
Ros Lobo
Ros was appointed as a trustee in June 2024 following a tenure as vice chair of the Members Council where she was also the regional representative for South West Thames for nearly 10 years. She was the chair of the St George’s, Merton and Wandsworth branch for 11 years and is currently the branch secretary.
Her career in the NHS spans over 40 years as a mental health professional in a range of senior roles and variety of settings. Half of her career was in health promotion, public health specialist and then as associate director of public health in South West London Health Authorities, Trusts and PCTs. She retired in 2011 and joined the NHS Retirement Fellowship.
David Paterson
David is the Scottish representative on the board of trustees chairing the Fellowship’s audit, risk and investment and benevolent fund committees. He is the treasurer of his local branch in Forth Valley and secretary of the NHS Federation of Scottish Branches. In addition, he chairs the Falkirk Older People’s Network and the Scottish Older People’s Assembly. David’s background is in NHS corporate and general management. He worked at Glasgow, Argyll and Clyde and Forth Valley health boards in administrative and general management posts and as a project and corporate affairs director. He retired in 2012. He lives in Falkirk and is married with one daughter and one granddaughter.
Mabel Saw
Mabel is an external trustee and joined the Fellowship in 2022. She has been chair of the NHS 75 Steering Group and is part of the committee for the Fellowship’s Benevolent Fund. She was also a panel member in selecting the new chair, chief executive and trustees.
Mabel comes from a dental background. She currently supports dental registrants in difficulty and delivers postgraduate CPD courses on dental law and ethics. Mabel lives in Cambridgeshire with her husband and golden retriever, Bruno.