Iona Heath worked as an inner-city general practitioner in Kentish Town in London from 1975 until 2010, caring for a mostly disadvantaged and hugely ethnically diverse population.    She was a nationally elected member of the Council of the UK Royal College of General Practitioners from 1989 to 2010 and chaired the College’s Committee on Medical Ethics from 1998 to 2004 and the International Committee from 2006 to 2009. She was elected President of the College for a three-year term from 2009 to 2012.

From 1993 to 2001, she was an editorial adviser for the British Medical Journal and chaired the journal’s Ethics Committee from 2004 to 2009.  She was a member of the world executive of the World Organisation of Family Doctors from 2007 to 2012.  

She gave the Harveian Oration for the UK Royal College of Physicians in 2011.

She wrote a regular Op Ed column for the British Medical Journal for eight years and has contributed essays to many other medical journals across the world.  She has been particularly interested to explore the nature of general practice, the importance of medical generalism, issues of justice and liberty in relation to health care, the corrosive influence of the medical industrial complex and the commercialisation of medicine, and the challenges posed by disease-mongering, the care of the dying, and violence within families.  Her most recent book John Berger – Ways of Learning was published by Oxford University Press in September in the UK and on November 12 in the US.

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Frances Stead Sellers is an associate editor of The Washington Post and frequent moderator for the newsroom’s live platform, Washington Post Live, where she has interviewed key figures in the response to the coronavirus pandemic including former NIH director Francis Collins, NIAID director Tony Fauci and Microsoft founder Bill Gates among many others.

In recent years, as the newsroom’s Senior Writer, Sellers has written extensively about the impact of abortion bans and about the US response to the coronavirus pandemic. She has tackled the challenges facing public health physicians and contributed stories to The Post’s prize-winning series on the US life expectancy crisis, with a particular focus on the importance of primary care in preventing and managing chronic illness.

Sellers has been a senior editor in charge of several sections of the Post, including running prize-winning health, science and environmental coverage during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the battle over health reform, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Other positions include Editor of The Post’s signature Style section and Deputy Editor of Outlook, the Sunday commentary section.

Sellers was born in Britain – the only one of her siblings not to become a doctor. She graduated from Oxford and came to the United States as a British Thouron Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania.

Before joining The Post she was Deputy editor of Civilization, the National Magazine Award-winning magazine of the Library of Congress, and Manuscript Editor of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Professor Catherine Hudon MD, PhD, is a clinician-researcher in the Department of Family Medicine and Emergency Medicine, and assistant Vice Dean for Clinical Research at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of Université de Sherbrooke. She is also interim scientific director of Réseau-1 Québec, a primary care research and innovation network, the Quebec branch of the Canadian Primary Care Research Network. She holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Implementing Integrated Care for People with Complex Needs and is an expert in mixed methods, participatory approaches with key stakeholders, and the scale-up of integrated care innovations. She is a consultant to the Quebec Ministry of Health and Social Services on the scale-up of the V1SAGES approach, which she and her team have been developing and evaluating for the past 12 years. She is a member of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and of the College of the Royal Society of Canada.

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