Richard Smith (editor)
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Richard Smith CBE FMedSci is a British medical doctor, editor, and businessman.
Achievements
He was the director of the UnitedHealth Chronic Disease Initiative at Emory University (which grew out of the UnitedHealth “Ovations initiative”),[1] which together with the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has created 11 centres in low and middle income countries that work on non-communicable disease.[2]
Smith also serves as chair of the Cochrane Library Oversight Committee and a member of the UK Panel on Research Integrity.[2] Additionally, he is currently chairman of the board of directors of Patients Know Best.
Previously he was chief executive of UnitedHealth Europe, a subsidiary of the UnitedHealth Group that works with public health systems in Europe. Before that, from 1991 to 2004, he served as both editor-in-Chief of the BMJ (previously the British Medical Journal), and chief executive of the BMJ Group. Smith worked for the BMJ for twenty-five years, from 1979 to 2004.[2]
He is an honorary professor at Imperial College London and the University of Warwick[2] and a member of the governing council of St George's, University of London.[3]
He is a founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, elected in 1998.
Having qualified in medicine in the University of Edinburgh, he worked in hospitals in Scotland and New Zealand before joining the BMJ. He also has a degree in management science from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Smith worked for six years as a television doctor with the BBC and TV-AM.[4] He has published in dozens of medical journals, written widely in the lay press and currently blogs regularly for the BMJ. He has received three awards for journalism.[2]
Family
His brother is comedian Arthur Smith.[5]
