A HEREFORDSHIRE health chief has been named among the top six healthcare leaders in the country.

Glen Burley, Chief Executive at Wye Valley NHS Trust, South Warwickshire NHS Foundation Trust, and George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust, has been named as a runner up in the prestigious Health Service Journal’s “Top Chief Executives for 2022”.

Mr Burley started his career in the NHS as a finance trainee in 1983 and now oversees the three acute and community NHS trusts.

He joined SWFT as chief executive in 2006, and steered the trust through financial turnaround, achieving foundation trust status in 2010 and achieving an ‘outstanding’ rating by the Care Quality Commission in 2019, a spokesperson said.

In 2016 Mr Burley became chief executive of Wye Valley NHS Trust, and has seen the trust improve and innovate through the sharing of best practice and learning from each other. More latterly the foundation group was joined by the George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust.

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With his leadership and passion, the trusts have continually improved by working together to overcome common challenges and share best practice, a Wye Valley NHS Trust spokesperson said.

"He strongly believes that happy and motivated staff provide the very best care to patients and therefore the organisations he leads place great emphasis on staff engagement and wellbeing.

"This is demonstrated by all three trusts making significant improvements in the national NHS staff survey."

In recognition for his on-going commitment to health services, Mr Burley was recently awarded an honorary doctorate in Business Administration by Coventry University.

Mr Burley said: “I’m honoured to be named in this list, among some amazing colleagues. Working in the NHS has been extremely rewarding and recognition like this is a credit to all of the people I have the privilege of working with.”