Dr Hester Ward
Medical Director
Information Services Division
NHS National Services Scotland
Gyle Square
Edinburgh
EH12 9EB
Hester has recently joined ISD as Medical Director. She is a Consultant in Public Health Medicine and an Honorary Reader at the University of Edinburgh, School of Molecular and Clinical Medicine. At ISD she is interested in developing the use of information for maximal health gain at an individual and a population level. She is also keen to see Scotland continue to be a leader in the provision of health infomation and sees ISD working with its many partners to achieve this aim.
For the past 10 years she was consultant epidemiologist at the National Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease Surveillance Unit. Here she was named on many UK and European funded grants and was the prinicpal investigator of a Department of Health/ Scottish Government funded unique UK case control study investigating risk factors of Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease (CJD), including variant CJD. From this she has published in many peer reviewed journals.
She is also interested in medical ethics, public health and epidemiological research and how both are used in developing and implementing policy.