Prof JS Bamrah CBE

A psychiatrist and Apperta director on taxpayers funding private profit, digital silos, and why the alternative is not better known.

Part of the OpenEyes Conference interview series, recorded on 16 September 2026 in Cardiff, UK.

Applying the Not-for-Profit Custodian Model Across the NHS

There's lots of digitalisation of the NHS. Much of it is private … it's taxpayers' money, after all - you and I pay for that - but taxpayers are not aware of what huge profit-making companies these are.

About Prof JS Bamrah CBE

Professor JS Bamrah CBE is one of three directors of the Apperta Foundation and an NHS consultant psychiatrist. He was formerly medical director of a Manchester mental health trust.

Interview summary

He came to Apperta through a clinical problem in his own specialty. As a medical director he became aware that patients were losing their lives unnecessarily to the side effects of psychiatric drugs, with mortality risk raised by metabolic syndrome in patients on long-term medication - drugs which, he is careful to add, are also life-saving. His conclusion was that technology needed to do more than hold a record: it needed to audit monitoring digitally. That work led to his introduction to Apperta and an invitation to become a director.

What attracted him was the principle: open source, available to anybody with an interest in developing it for communities, and not-for-profit, with resources coming in distributed to the cause. He ties it deliberately to Bevan, noting that he should mention Bevan while sitting in Cardiff.

Asked how well the sector has engaged, he says it could engage better. Much NHS digitisation is private, paid for with taxpayers' money, and taxpayers are unaware of the scale of profit involved. He objects to data being taken out of the NHS. On clinicians he reports a broad spectrum, including fear of artificial intelligence and the common complaint that digitisation has meant more time at the computer and less with patients. From outside ophthalmology, he judges that the shared model reduces paperwork while increasing the scope of governance and of reducing risk.

His diagnosis of why the model is not better known is simple: the message does not go out, and post-Covid everyone is too busy clinically. Awareness is the first task. He places the second gap in procurement, done at a senior level where interest in supporting social enterprise is missing. On his own application he says other trusts built their own and did it better than he would have, and that twelve years on he does not believe the underlying problem is solved.