Healthcare Consulting
Verita is a leading UK independent healthcare consultant with a wealth of experience helping public and private organisations deliver exceptional care
A Healthcare Consultancy Which Drives Quality Improvement
At Verita, we have a long and successful history as healthcare consultants, making improvements through investigation, training, and development throughout both the NHS and the private sector.
Our comprehensive approach to address critical areas for organisational improvement includes assessing technology and processes, providing insights into change improvement programs, setting out a roadmap for effective leadership, providing practical recommendations for service improvements, and empowering staff at all levels.
Healthcare is a complex and highly regulated industry leading to heightened risks and unforeseen compliance concerns. We provide tailored solutions which enable healthcare organisations to navigate these evolving challenges and deliver exceptional care.
To speak to a healthcare consultant, please book a free consultation or simply call us on 020 7494 5670 so we can discuss how we can help your organisation.
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How Verita can help
We use our extensive experience to empower healthcare organisations, from primary care to specialist services and commissioning bodies.
As specialist healthcare consultants, we support your organisation’s transformation with evidence-based reports and recommendations which ensure the needs of multiple stakeholders within the business are met, while ensuring governance and systems are resilient and sustainable.
Our healthcare consultancy services are solution-based, helping our clients overcome compliance and governance issues with the ultimate goal of improving patient safety.
Common themes from our healthcare work
We see common themes from our work in healthcare. If your organisation is experiencing any of the following issues, we can help:
- Organisations overlooking ‘weak signals’ suggesting a problem. In our experience, serious incidents are rarely a bolt from the blue.
- Executives and senior managers not ‘walking the organisation’ to find out first-hand about organisational challenges
- Poor relations between teams and team members invariably leading to poor service and/or poor performance
- Organisational governance systems rarely telling the whole story
- A poor organisational culture undermining just about everything
Leaving these issues unaddressed can lead to significant reputational and operational harm. We provide the independent expertise needed to build a more resilient culture. Connect with our senior team today to see how we can support your specific challenges.
Recent high-profile healthcare investigation work
Our most recent high-profile investigation was published by Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in late October 2025, where we conducted an independent healthcare investigation into patient safety to determine whether there were missed opportunities to identify and prevent harm following concerns raised about an orthopaedic surgeon.
This wide-ranging review required us to identify all the gaps, errors or missed signals between 2012 to 2024. This included assessing the effectiveness of the management, whether governance arrangements were sufficient and whether they were complied with, and review the trust’s responses to complaints and patient safety incidents relating to the surgeon.
The trust responded by accepting our findings and setting out a plan to implement our recommendations to ensure patient safety is improved and lessons are learned.
Why choose Verita?
We work collaboratively with public and private organisations, spanning a wide range of operational and cultural aspects, equipping us with a direct understanding of the many challenges faced and how to resolve them.
Our experienced consultants have played pivotal roles in high-profile reviews, working with the NHS on a variety of complex cases to provide independent investigations and reports to drive quality improvement.
Such work includes:
- An independent report for the Secretary of State for Health into the themes and lessons learnt from NHS investigations into Jimmy Savile
- The independent inquiry into Mid Staffordshire NHS FT, published in 2010
- An independent review into the effectiveness of safety procedures at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust.
With experience in carrying out healthcare investigations into whistleblowers and collective grievances, we are equipped to assure board members, particularly non-executives and lay members, that the handling of these sensitive issues is in line with local and national standards.
We can provide an invaluable back-office function to reviews, to support the review leads in the collation and analysis of evidence, and produce the final report.
What Our Clients Say About Us
“I wanted to thank the team at Verita for their outstanding work overseeing the NHS investigation reports, and for the excellent Lessons Learned Report – we appreciate your contribution to this important work.”
“Ed and the team at Verita provided a thorough and objective assessment of some difficult cases for us, helping us identify areas for improvement, meet a commitment to openness and engage the families involved. It made a real difference in addressing some long standing difficult issues.”
Case Study: Independent Review Into Patient Safety
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust asked Verita to undertake an independent review of how it responds when things go wrong, and how the responses could be improved.
We assembled a team of experienced consultants specialising in healthcare and safety to review several matters surrounding patient safety at the trust. We made recommendations to improve serious incident investigations, safety management, reporting processes, support systems and ensuring a system was in place to learn from incidents to avoid recurrence.
Verita's investigation framework
Our investigative work is guided by Verita’s operating framework to ensure consistency and quality. The operating framework sets out the phases and technical steps in an investigation.
All investigations are peer reviewed internally to ensure the quality of the work. Some investigations require input from an expert or a person with particular characteristics. When this is the case, we help our client to identify, check and recruit them.
Key Team Members & Associates
Ed Marsden
Ed Marsden has a clinical background in general and psychiatric nursing and NHS management, and has worked for the Department of Health and the West Kent Health Authority as director of performance management.
He combines his responsibilities as Verita’s founder with an active role in leading complex consultancy and investigations. He worked with Kate Lampard to provide independent oversight of the 40 or so investigations carried out by the NHS into allegations about Jimmy Savile. Recent work includes leading a review of patient safety at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, and investigating the work-related death of an NHS manager.
Peter Killwick
Peter has 25 years of consulting experience covering a variety of strategic and operational issues in a wide range of sectors including healthcare.
He has extensive experience of conducting complex investigations within the NHS, both at operational and commissioner level, including several cases involving allegations raised by whistle-blowers.
Our Clients
Reasons to work with a healthcare management consultant
In healthcare, incidents can be complex, and carrying out a review free of internal bias can be challenging, especially for overstretched teams. Our healthcare consultants can help restore public trust with an objective and transparent review process which ensures lessons are learned and services are improved.
As well as being impartial, we bring specialised diagnostic tools and cross-sector benchmarking that internal reviews often lack, ensuring that root causes are not just identified, but systematically addressed.
By allowing our experts to handle these complex investigations for you, your leadership can maintain operational focus on frontline delivery while gaining the regulatory assurance needed to satisfy oversight bodies. This comprehensive approach ensures that lessons are not only learned but are translated into sustainable service improvements that protect both patients and the organisation’s reputation.
Healthcare Consultancy Services – areas covered by Verita
As healthcare management consultants, we understand the impact that organisational culture can have on patient safety. We provide strategic guidance on how to achieve a just culture and how to enhance leadership capabilities across networks while promoting resilient cultures that prioritise patient safety and encourage open communication.
Navigate complex regulatory landscapes confidently with our governance advisory services tailored to meet both national standards and internal objectives. Our governance review service allows healthcare organisations to get to the bottom of any trust or department-wide issues that are impacting on the provision of high-quality care. We also evaluate the effectiveness of improvement programmes to provide board level insights on what has worked and what hasn’t.
Patient safety is obviously an overriding objective for the NHS. Our consultancy experience in the healthcare sector enables us to provide support to improve patient outcomes by looking at why things go wrong and what can be done to prevent them going wrong in future. Our expertise in human performance allows us to analyse the design of healthcare systems and procedures to improve their safety and efficiency.
We offer human performance training modules designed to equip your workforce with the skills necessary to excel in dynamic environments focused on continuous improvement.
Our consultants work closely with your teams to ensure seamless adoption of health tech innovations that improve patient care delivery and efficiency.
We provide CPD accredited patient safety investigation training on all aspects of a patient safety incident, from data collection and analysis to report writing.
Verita offers the NHS and private sectors a wide range of complaints management services, including helping to get on top of backlogs and helping to put better, safer, and fairer systems in place.
We have a track record of supporting clients to get CQC warning notices lifted, and our range of long-established serious incident solutions quality assure clients that their processes for handling serious incidents are robust.
We benchmark the performance of these processes against best practice standards and provide recommendations on areas for quality improvement in healthcare.
Find out more
To learn how Verita can assist your organisation to develop resilient healthcare systems which enhance patient outcomes, contact Verita’s founder, Ed Marsden on 020 7494 5670 or via email at [email protected].
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Healthcare Consulting FAQs
We provide consultancy services spanning all types of healthcare organisations, including NHS trusts, private healthcare providers, integrated care boards (ICBs), and specialist clinics. Our expertise can be scaled according to client requirements, allowing us to support both large-scale organisational transformations and targeted service improvements within specific departments.
Objectivity is at the core of all of our work. Our consultants are external experts, often with clinical or senior NHS backgrounds, who provide a “fresh set of eyes” on internal processes. We use evidence-based methodologies to ensure our findings and recommendations are impartial, helping to restore stakeholder trust and provide a clear, unbiased path forward.
Yes. We believe that sustainable change is driven by people. Our services include empowering leadership teams with clear strategic roadmaps and providing staff with the tools and training they need to implement new processes. We focus on building internal capability so that improvements continue long after our consultancy ends.
We specialise in managing complexity. For organisations operating across multiple sites or those undergoing mergers, we provide benchmarking and standardisation services. We analyse data and processes across the entire organisation to identify variations in care or governance, helping you create a just culture of safety and efficiency.