9 June 2022
The St Helena Health Services Directorate has welcomed the new Chief Medical Officer, Dr Peter Moss. Dr Moss arrived to the Island on Saturday, 21 May 2022, with his wife Jane and their daughter Alex.
Peter has been a consultant in infectious diseases since 1999. He has also held a number of senior management positions in large acute NHS Trusts, including Chief Medical Officer at Hull & East Yorkshire Hospitals. His main clinical interest has been viral hepatitis, but he has worked within the full range of infectious diseases, and was the Director of Infection Prevention and Control for more than 10 years. For the past couple of years much of Peter’s time has been devoted to managing patients with COVID-19.
Peter qualified from the University of Birmingham Medical School in 1987, and did his early general medical training in Birmingham. After passing the exams for Membership of the Royal College of Physicians he trained in Infectious Diseases at Sheffield and at Liverpool, where he also worked as honorary clinical lecturer at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (including a period in Malawi). He spent three years in full time research at the University of Liverpool, achieving a Doctorate in Medicine based on investigation of the clinical pharmacology of antifungal drugs. He has also trained in General Internal Medicine, spending time as a senior trainee in gastroenterology and in respiratory medicine, and obtained dual specialist accreditation (Infectious Diseases and General Medicine) with the General Medical Council in 1999.
Peter has chaired the NHS England Clinical Reference Group on Infectious Diseases, and the NHS England National Advisory Group on Viral Hepatitis. He has been president/member of various medical research organisations over the years and currently sits on the UK Government’s Advisory Group on Antimicrobial Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infection. Until recently Peter was Associate Editor of the Journal of Infection, he is the author of a number of book chapters, and numerous papers in infectious diseases journals.
Peter said:
“It is wonderful to finally arrive on St Helena, and the rain has disappeared for the end of our quarantine. You have some excellent staff in Health Care here, and I am looking forward to working with them to develop the medical services on the Island. My first priority is to make sure that we are all prepared for SARS CoV2/COVID, but I want to reassure people that the current form of the virus causes much less severe illness than the original form that we were fighting in the UK in 2020. The vaccination programme here has been fantastic, with the great majority of people fully immunised, which gives us the best possible chance of avoiding a serious outbreak. My hope is that we can get through COVID quickly, and then move on with addressing the challenges of providing high quality health care for the future on St Helena.”
SHG
9 June 2022