Shirlene Oh, Chief Strategy and Population Health Officer at Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, has been awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of London by Royal Holloway for her contributions to healthcare innovation and leadership.
The Doctor of Science Honoris Causa recognises Shirlene’s outstanding role and achievements in improving healthcare as well as her commitment to building fairer, more sustainable health systems that tackle the root causes of poor health and support healthier communities.
Shirlene began her career studying Chemistry, achieving her undergraduate degree and going on to complete a PhD at the University of Durham, investigating how certain chemicals can form potentially cancer-causing free radicals.
Her career trajectory took her to GlaxoSmithKline, where she contributed to new medicine development and established the company's Sustainable Health Lab- an initiative focused on creating economically viable models of wellness and care delivery.
Moving to the NHS in 2015, Shirlene joined Hampshire Hospitals in 2019. In her current role, she serves as Executive Lead for Strategy, Population Health Management, Innovation, Climate Change, Health Creation, and Health Inequalities and oversees the New Hospital Programme.
Shirlene focuses on the social factors that influence health and promotes ways of working with seldom-heard communities and partners to reduce health inequalities, building on local assets that already support health creation.
Shirlene says: “I’ve never followed a rigid plan, I’ve just got an insatiable curiosity, not just for answers but for better questions. As a result, I’ve become a systems thinker, someone willing to embrace complexity rather than reduce it. Because within complexity, I’ve found patterns of resilience, of health and of transformation.”
Throughout her career, she has taken an innovative and inclusive approach, striving to create healthcare systems that service everyone effectively. This ethos now drives her commitment to understanding how people interact with these systems, especially as the NHS adapts to future challenges.
