The judges for the 2023 ITEC Awards have been specially selected based on their experience and knowledge of TEC and their profile within the care and support sector. The judges take time out of their busy schedules to read and comment on all submissions for each award category. They score each submission in order to create a shortlist of finalists for each category as well as the overall winner. TSA would like to thank the judges for the time and effort they give in supporting the ITEC Awards.
View the judges profiles below
The judges for the 2023 ITEC Awards are:
Fiona Brown, Associate, NE ADASS
Professor George Crooks OBE, CEO, Digital Health & Care Institute
Alyson Scurfield, Chief Executive, TSA
Madeleiane Starr MBE, Director of Business Development & Innovation, Carers UK
Professor Jonathan Wallace, Professor of Innovation, University of Ulster
Professor George Crooks OBE, CEO, Digital Health & Care Institute
Professor George Crooks is currently the Chief Executive of the Digital Health and Care Institute, Scotland’s national innovation centre for digital health and care. He leads an organisation that is tasked with delivering innovation in digital health and care that will help Scotland’s people to live longer, healthier lives, deliver sustainable health and care services for the future and create economic benefits for Scotland. DHI provides opportunities for Scotland’s public sector, academia and industry to co-design digital solutions to some of the country’s biggest health and care challenges working with patients, service users and their families.
He was previously the Medical Director for NHS 24, the Scottish Ambulance Service and Director of the Scottish Centre for Telehealth & Telecare. George was a General Medical Practitioner for 23 years in Aberdeen latterly combining that role as Director of Primary Care for Grampian. George is on the Board of the European Connected Health Alliance and is a past president of the European Health Telematics Association. He is a Board member of TEC Quality, a UK organisation leading the implementation of quality standards and practices across the assisted living sector in the UK. He was an assessor for the European Commission on programmes involving digital health and care provision, led the Integrated Care Action Group in the European Innovation Partnership for Active and Healthy Ageing and is a member of the WHO roster of experts for digital health. He has been an advisor to several European governments and global organisations including the World Bank on digital health and care. He is an advisor to Innovate UK for its Industrial Grand Challenge programme for Health Ageing. He is also an adjunct Professor of Telehealth at the University of Southern Denmark.
He was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s New Year Honours List 2011 for services to healthcare.
Alyson Scurfield, Chief Executive, TSA
Alyson Scurfield is a well-known visionary leader of service transformation, delivery and business development in the digital health and care sectors. She is currently Chief Executive of the TEC Services Association (TSA) and its subsidiary TEC Quality.
As a key thought leader, Alyson has held a number of leadership positions, focusing on driving standards, quality improvement and workforce development both via TSA involvement in policy development and in setting sector service quality benchmarks in the UK and Europe with TEC Quality and UKAS. Passionate about how technology can transform care, she has led TSA’s partnership work with Department of Health and Social Care and NHSx during the challenges of Covid-19.
She is also driving the industry agenda for quality and continuous improvement with the TEC Quality standards framework to support population health. Her vision is for TSA to drive innovation to achieve integration of health, housing and social care.
Madeleiane Starr MBE, Director of Business Development & Innovation, Carers UK
Madeleine Starr MBE is Director of Business Development and Innovation at Carers UK, a not-for-profit organisation working to improve the lives of unpaid carers.
Madeleine joined Carers UK in 2000 to lead its work on carers and employment.
In 2009 she was recognised as a Working Families Pioneer for ‘her sustained and successful campaigning for carers’ employment rights’ and for her influence in establishing the Employers for Carers membership forum, launched in 2009. Madeleine was awarded an MBE in 2012 for services to employment.
She is currently leading Carers UK’s work on digital innovation in health, care and the third sector. She is a member of the Board of TSA (the Technology Enabled Care Services Association), a member of the UKRI Healthy Ageing Challenge Advisory Group, a member of the Expert Review Group for the UKRI Social, Behavioural and Design Research Programme (SBDRP) and a Co-Investigator of the ESRC Centre for Care research programme.
Professor Jonathan Wallace, Professor of Innovation, University of Ulster
Professor Jonathan Wallace is Professor of Innovation within the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment at Ulster University. His excellence in both Knowledge & Technology Transfer and lecturing has been recognised by his being awarded a Distinguished Business Fellowship and Distinguished Teaching Fellowship.
He has led the development of numerous software systems in diverse market sectors and has attained broad experience of managing successful research projects at both a local, national and international level. Jonathan has a significant track record in the field of Digital Health and is recognised as an innovator in the co-creation of user-centred Digital Health product and service solutions. He is a founder member of the TRAIL Living Lab based at the Ulster University as well as the BCS Health NI Special Interest Group. He is a founder member and Deputy Chair of the Northern Ireland Science Festival as well as Chair of the IET/BCS annual Belfast Turing Lecture. Professor Wallace chaired and remains a member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology Policy Group for Northern Ireland and is a member of the All-Party Advisory Group on Science, Engineering, Technology and Maths for the local devolved Government Assembly.
He currently has a leading role in a number of regional, national and international Digital Health research projects where he is particularly applying his expertise in Co-creation, UX & Usability Engineering, Data Science and Business Model Development. Jonathan is a judge on a number of UK national awards competitions for Innovation in Digital Health and Wellbeing. Jonathan led the Ulster University academic team which successfully completed Phase Zero for the EC-funded H2020 MAGIC PCP Project for Stroke Rehabilitation and he was also Dissemination and Exploitation Workpackage Leader and Chair of the Policy Board for the recently successfully completed EC-funded H2020 MIDAS Project for ‘Big Data Supporting Public Health Policies’. He is currently Leader for WorkPackage 1: “Human-centred and Trustworthy AI Solutions” for the recently launched 4 year €12.5M LUCIA Horizon Europe Project on AI for multi-omic, socioeconomic and epigenetic risk factors for Lung Cancer.
A champion of developing entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial skills and knowledge in Ulster’s students, Jonathan is also a judge on the UUSU’s Annual Shark Tank Awards and a judge for the 2023 Student INVENT Awards. The ‘engage’ service solution which Jonathan has led the development and commercialisation of, has been significantly used as a real-time stakeholder engagement tool to gain strategic consensus across government, industry and academia including for the HSC NI Workforce Strategy 2017 to 2026; all the sub-specialisms for the AHP Workforce Strategy. Most recent engagements have been both sides of the border in Ireland identifying user needs as part of our North South HEA funded project AIM4HEALTH which focuses on AI approaches to reducing mental health inequalities in Ireland.
With over 105 peer-reviewed publications, Jonathan lectures on the University’s innovative M.Sc. Digital Marketing Communication and Leadership, as well as their undergraduate and postgraduate Computing degrees.