Chief Digital and Transformation Officer, Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust

Ben Emly leads digital and organisational transformation at Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust (SASH), combining visible, values-led executive leadership with a consistent focus on patient safety, staff experience, and long-term sustainability. His approach is grounded in frontline reality — championing co-design, Lean principles, and “go and see” leadership to ensure change is shaped by lived experience rather than imposed from above.

Key achievements include deploying the eSASH Electronic Patient Record with clinically-led digital care pathways, launching the MySASH NHS Patient Portal serving over 150,000 patients with more than 100,000 going paperless, replacing bleeps and paper-based handovers through the SASH@OOH transformation, and embedding PURPOSE T into the EPR to support earlier identification of at-risk patients. The Trust recorded its lowest ever hospital-acquired pressure ulcer rate under his leadership — demonstrating that digital transformation, designed well, directly reduces avoidable harm.

Ben’s guiding principle throughout: “Digital choice, not digital exclusion — enhancing access without disadvantaging patients who need non-digital routes.”

He is featured as one of 78 NHS South East colleagues celebrated in a campaign marking the NHS’s 78th birthday and the first anniversary of England’s 10 Year Health Plan.