Dr Penny Dash – Biography (Updated July 2025)
Dr Penny Dash has focused her career on improving the quality and efficiency of health and care services in order to enhance life expectancy and quality of life. She has worked both as a hospital doctor and a public health physician and previously served as Head of Strategy for the NHS and the Department of Health and Social Care.
Over the past two decades, Penny has built an extensive international reputation as a senior advisor to healthcare systems globally. She spent five years with the Boston Consulting Group and over 20 years with McKinsey & Company, where she was a Partner and Senior Partner, and led McKinsey’s healthcare practice across Europe. She has held several board positions, including Vice Chair of The King’s Fund, Non-Executive Director on the board of Monitor (the former regulator of NHS Foundation Trusts), and most recently as Chair of the North West London Integrated Care Board.
In 2024 and 2025, Penny led two significant independent reviews commissioned by government to examine the effectiveness and impact of national regulatory and oversight bodies within health and care.
- In October 2024, she published a comprehensive review into the operational effectiveness of the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which set out a series of recommendations to improve the consistency, clarity and focus of the CQC’s regulatory role.
- In July 2025, she followed this with a wide-ranging review of patient safety across the health and care landscape, which highlighted duplication, fragmentation, and insufficient strategic coordination among national bodies. Her report set out nine major recommendations to reduce bureaucracy, sharpen the system’s focus on learning and quality, and strengthen the voice of patients.
Penny is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London. She holds an MSc in Public Health Medicine and an MBA from Stanford Business School, where she was a Fulbright Scholar.