Professor Ian Sinha
Professor Sinha is a full time NHS consultant respiratory paediatrician at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital with particular interest in asthma and neonatal lung disease and a Professor in the Division of Child Health at the University of Liverpool. In addition to respiratory paediatrics, Ian is particularly interested in the impact of social and health inequalities on child health and now is seen as a national expert describing the impact of poverty on disease and health outcomes and creating an evidence base to help understand interventions and ways of improving children’s health.
Professor Sinha has authored papers on topics including allergens and the effects on asthma, the effects of e-cigarettes and their advertising, as well as societal context papers on the effects of poverty and children’s health.
Professor Sinha played a key role in supporting the College’s recent and ongoing work on health inequalities. He provided RCPCH with a framework to consider interventions and generously continues to support this very important area of child health advocacy work at the College.
Dr Elizabeth Whittaker
Dr Liz Whittaker is senior clinical lecturer in paediatric infectious diseases and immunology. She divides her time between Imperial College London and the Department of Paediatric Infectious Diseases at St. Marys Hospital, London. She has a strong research track record and during the pandemic helped describe a novel inflammatory syndrome in children knowns as PIMS-TS (paediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome) and was co-lead on several studies, including the CLoCK study investigating Long Covid in children.
Dr Whittaker has a strong interest in education and training, having been quality advisor to the Paediatric Allergy, Immunology and Infectious Diseases College Specialty Advisory Committee. She is now Convenor of the British Paediatric Allergy Immunity and Infection Group which is affiliated to RCPCH.
She tirelessly supported the College during the COVI pandemic as a member of our Expert Reference group and helped with multiple media requests on the huge variety of questions pertaining to CYP during the pandemic. She has since helped the College develop guidelines for acute non-A-E hepatitis and Mpox (monkeypox).
Team Soft Landing - Dr Nadia Baasher and Dr Habab Easa
For the first time this year we are pleased to make a joint members award, for two of our members who have together made an outstanding contribution by co-founding the Soft Landing Project.
Soft Landing is a voluntary non-profit organisation which aims to “cushion“ the landing of international medical graduates when arriving to work in the NHS. They do this by drawing on their own experience and that of their ever growing team to run workshops and induction programmes to support international medical graduates in their transition from their country of origin to the UK.
The co- founders set out to offer the support they wished had been available when they first arrived to work in the NHS from overseas.
Dr Nadia Baasher graduated from Cairo and is from a mixed background: Irish, Yemeni and Sudanese. She is a London paediatric ST7 trainee with ambitions to become a paediatric emergency medicine consultant. She works and lives by the motto: “Kindness and tolerance are above all differences.”
Dr Habab Easa is a senior paediatric trainee in the Oxford Deanery who came from her home country, Sudan, to train in the UK. She is passionate about celebrating diversity, tackling systemic racism and differential attainment, and the wellbeing of the workforce.