Healthcare & Life Sciences

Board-level judgement for a health system in transition.

Shelmont Advisory is a two-partner firm built on former NHS national leadership and senior life sciences commercial experience. We do three things: convene the experts who can answer your question, set strategy that survives contact with the system, and sit on boards as the independent voice that has been on both sides of the table.

Expert Groups

Advisory boards, clinical reference groups and expert panels — convened, chaired and concluded.

Strategy

Market access, system transformation and digital adoption, grounded in how the NHS really decides.

Non-Executive

Chair, NED and committee roles, board assurance and clinical quality oversight.

Where our experience was built

NHS England
Gilead Sciences
Bayer
Philips
AstraZeneca
Health Innovation East
University Hospitals of Leicester

What we do

Three services. No adjacent offer.

Most advisory firms sell a menu. We deliberately sell three things, because they are the three that draw on what we actually did: run a national programme, build a commercial route into it, and hold a board to account for the result.

Expert Groups

We assemble, brief and chair the group of people who can answer your question.

Advisory boards, clinical reference groups, expert panels, steering groups and standing faculties. We know who the credible voices are across general practice, integrated care boards, secondary care, the royal colleges, industry and the innovation ecosystem — and, just as importantly, who will actually turn up and say something useful.

A group is only worth convening if it reaches a conclusion. We frame the question before the first meeting, chair independently so the room is not led by the sponsor, and leave you with a written position you can put in front of a board, a regulator or a payer.

What you get

Membership design and recruitment — the right seniority and disciplines
Independent chairing and facilitation
Framing papers, pre-reads and a single clear question

A written consensus statement or set of recommendations
Declarations of interest and transparent governance
Ongoing secretariat where the group is standing rather than one-off

Typically for Pharmaceutical and medtech companies who need genuinely credible clinical input rather than a friendly room; NHS systems building consensus across organisations that do not report to one another; innovators who need a defensible evidence position before seeking adoption.

Strategy

Strategy that accounts for how the NHS actually buys, adopts and changes.

Plenty of strategies are correct and undeliverable. The difference usually sits in the detail of how money flows, who holds the decision, what a system is already being held to account for, and how long adoption really takes. We have written the national policy, negotiated the contracts, and sold into the result.

Engagements range from a short, sharp read on whether a market entry route is viable, through to a full transformation design for a system or a multi-year access strategy for a therapy area.

Where this lands

UK & Ireland market access and market entry strategy
System transformation and the integration of primary, community and social care
Digital health and AI adoption frameworks that scale beyond the pilot

Commercial models for selling into the NHS and value-proposition design
Public affairs, policy engagement and stakeholder strategy
Partnership, licensing and evaluation routes for scale-ups

Typically for Life sciences and health technology companies entering or scaling in the UK and Ireland; integrated care boards and providers redesigning services; investors who need a clear-eyed view of an asset’s route to adoption.

Non-Executive

An independent board voice that has sat on both sides of the table.

Chair, non-executive director, senior independent director and board adviser appointments, along with the committee work that carries the real assurance load: audit and risk, quality, and remuneration. We take a small number of seats so that each one gets proper preparation time.

Our experience covers the harder end of the board agenda — strengthening a board assurance framework, carrying a financial recovery plan, holding clinical quality oversight across multiple sites, and governing through a crisis without losing sight of service continuity.

What you get

Non-executive director, chair and SID appointments
Audit, risk and quality committee chairing
Board assurance framework review and strengthening

Clinical governance and quality oversight
Board effectiveness reviews and development
Interim board-level assurance during transition or recovery

Typically for NHS trusts, integrated care boards and primary care organisations; health technology and life sciences companies whose boards need clinical and system literacy; charities, professional bodies and investor-backed platforms in health.

How we work

Three things we hold to.

We have been the customer

One of us was accountable for a national primary care budget; the other has spent a decade selling and scaling into the NHS. We can tell you how your proposition will be read on the other side of the table, because we have read propositions like it.

Clinical and commercial, same room

A GP and former NHS England national director working alongside a molecular biologist turned commercial director. Clinical credibility and commercial realism arrive together rather than as two separate invoices.

Written output, not a workshop

Every engagement ends in something you can circulate: a position, a recommendation, a plan with owners and sequencing. Facilitation is a method here, never the deliverable.

The record

62m

Patients covered by the national primary care brief held at NHS England

£1bn

National primary care budget under direct stewardship

30,000

GP, dental, pharmacy and optometry locations within that accountability

£450m

Commissioning budget carried through a delivered financial recovery plan

Figures reflect the scope of roles held by our principals in their executive careers at NHS England and in NHS commissioning, not consultancy engagements.

Who you work with

Two principals. You get both.

Shelmont is deliberately small. There is no delivery team behind the pitch team, and no one more junior turns up after the contract is signed.

Dr Ursula Montgomery

Founder & Director

A GP by background who went on to become National Director of Primary Care at NHS England, accountable for policy, contracting and transformation across general practice, dentistry, community pharmacy and optometry.

She was Senior Responsible Owner for the Fuller Stocktake on integrating primary care, the policy foundation beneath today’s neighbourhood health model, and directed the national framework for primary care recovery and digital transformation. Before Whitehall she chaired East Leicestershire & Rutland CCG through the merger of three CCGs and a financial recovery, and chaired the Leicester, Leicestershire & Rutland Integration Board for four years. She has since worked industry-side at Gilead Sciences and Bayer, which is where the commercial half of her judgement comes from.

NHS England — National Director of Primary Care; Senior Clinical Adviser, Provider Transformation
Gilead Sciences — Patient Access to Care Director, leading UK & Ireland strategy on WHO hepatitis elimination targets
Bayer UK — Head of UK & Ireland Communications, Public Affairs and Sustainability
NHS commissioning — Clinical Chair, East Leicestershire & Rutland CCG; Chair, LLR Integration Board
Provider side — Associate Medical Director, University Hospitals of Leicester; Director of Clinical Governance, InHealth

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Philip Shelton

Director

A scientist turned commercial leader who has spent his career on the difficult part of health innovation: getting a good idea past the pilot and into routine use.

He is Director of Industry Partnerships at Health Innovation East, where he has led work on scale-up, commercialisation and international trade across life sciences and health technology, including a period as interim Commercial Director. Earlier he was commercial lead for Philips population health management, running its proof-of-concept work with the NHS, the Cumbria Test Bed programme and the Manchester Healthy Ageing Programme, and supporting the integration of two acquisitions. He began as a molecular biologist at AstraZeneca and later ran a multi-million pound applied prevention research programme across Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland.

Health Innovation East — Director of Industry Partnerships; interim Commercial Director
Philips — Commercial Lead and Clinical Programme Manager, population health management
NHS — Business Development Manager, Primary Care
NIHR CLAHRC — Prevention Programme Manager, University Hospitals of Leicester
AstraZeneca — Associate Principal Scientist, respiratory and inflammation

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Where should you start?

A 30-second diagnostic.

Answer three quick questions and we will point you to the service that fits, and tell you why.

Get in touch

Tell us the decision you are stuck on.

The first conversation is straightforward: what you are trying to decide, who needs to be convinced, and by when. If we are not the right people, we will usually know within half an hour and say so.

Email hello@shelmont.co.uk LinkedIn Shelmont Advisory Ltd →