Department of Health’s Commercial Director joins GS1 UK’s board
London, 11 November 2020 – The Commercial Director of the Department of Health and Social Care, Melinda Johnson has joined the supervisory board of GS1 UK, the global data-standards organisation.
Melinda Johnson joined the Department of Health and Social Care in June 2017 following a period of 5 years as Group Commercial Director at the Department for Transport. Whilst at Transport Melinda was also Director of Property, Digital, Security and Information. Melinda joined the Civil Service in 2005 to be a Deputy Director in Commercial at the Department for Education where she held various commercial roles.
Melinda is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) and a Chartered Procurement Professional. Melinda's early career was in IT procurement in organisations such as National Power and British Telecom. Melinda has worked in the wider public sector as well as being Head of Policy at CIPS for 3 years. An advocate of CIPS, Melinda served 4 years on the CIPS Board and was Chair of CIPS Congress.
Melinda holds an MBA, a BSc Hons in Psychology and has a post graduate qualification in Marketing. She is a non-executive director of the British Quality Foundation and the NHS SCCL (Supply Chain Coordination Limited).
When asked about her appointment Melinda, said: “I am really looking forward to working with the team on the next iteration of GS1 UK’s strategy. Global standards are fundamental to the efficient running of a business and the data they facilitate is worth its weight in gold.
The GS1 UK team have a positive culture, which I think is a huge strength coupled with their neutrality, which helps them solve a wide range of industry challenges. The not for profit status helps underpin this facilitation role and I hope to use my commercial experience to help them build a plan to solve the problems of the future.”
The appointment is reflective of the focus GS1 UK has on solving the needs of the Healthcare sector, through the adoption of their unique identifiers to ensure the accurate identification of products, people and places.
This was reviewed in the recent Scan4Safety report shared by the DHSC and GS1 UK, which shared the learnings for 6 NHS hospital trusts that implemented regular point-of-care barcode scanning. As a result, they were able to guarantee complete traceability of healthcare items, securing millions of pounds of savings, releasing thousands of hours of clinical time and saving lives.
Melinda will be joining the likes of Amazon, eBay, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and Unilever on GS1 UK’s supervisory board, chaired by Chris Tyas who, during his career held a variety of executive roles at Nestle.
The appointment was announced at GS1 UK’s AGM towards the end of last week, the first for newly appointed CEO of GS1 UK Anne Godfrey, who is taking over the reins at the organisation.
Chris Tyas, chairman of GS1 UK, said: “Melinda is a much welcome addition to our board, strengthening our expertise in the healthcare sector and providing insights ensuring that the informed, protected consumer or patient remains at the heart of our strategy.
It is critical in these times of unprecedented change that we continue to bring diversity to our board so we can draw on the business expertise as well as their specialist areas of know-how. In that way we will continue to challenge our thinking and develop more innovative ways to support our members.”
- ENDS -
Notes to editors
For further information or requests for interviews, contact Sarah Atkins,chief marketing officer, on sarah.atkins@gs1uk.org or 07990 770 955.
About GS1 UK
GS1 UK is just one of 115 neutral and independent GS1 organisations operating worldwide. From product barcodes to patient wristbands, GS1 standards have been transforming the way we work and live for more than 40 years.
Whether online, in store or in a hospital, the common language of GS1 global standards is helping our community of more than 45,000 organisations across Britain to uniquely identify, describe and track anything, creating greater trust in data for everyone.