Thalamos is delighted to announce the arrival of Zoe Seager as Client Director, bringing with her invaluable experience of leading mental health strategy at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
In her DHSC government roles, Seager first served as senior strategy advisor in the central strategy unit. There she led cross-cutting and strategic projects in areas such as nursing education, vaccination and health system delivery architecture for the Secretary of State. Then, as Deputy Director for Mental Health, Seager worked directly on the delivery of the Long Term Plan transformation of mental health services. She chaired a programme board that delivered mental health support teams in schools as well as securing and delivering additional funding for mental health in developments scored by the Office for Budget Responsibility as the first health interventions to have an impact on the economic outlook.
Commenting on Seager joining Thalamus, CEO Arden Tomison said: “We are delighted to have someone of Zoe’s talent and experience joining the Thalamos team. “Our objective is to improve outcomes for patients by deploying digital tools and leveraging the data that they generate. Zoe’s experience of working within government and with the NHS, plus her strong values alignment with the rest of the team, is going to help us to take the next big step forward in delivering for patients. The whole Thalamos team and I welcome Zoe, and are very much looking forward to working with her.”
A big part of Seager’s role, the first of its kind at Thalamos, will be to oversee the successful roll out of the OneLondon eMHA programme. The implementation of the Thalamos eMHA product will transform how crisis mental health care is delivered across six London Mental Health Trusts. Beginning with East London NHS Foundation Trust and North London Mental Health Partnership in autumn 2024, the programme will provide “safer, faster and more joined up care for Londoners”, according to Luke Readman, Director of Digital Transformation at NHS England (London).
Mental health strategy experience
Prior to joining the Department of Heath and Social Care, Seager held a number of roles at Wellcome Trust where she was responsible for the development and delivery of the Evidence for Decision Making work stream within the vaccines strategy. She also has a PhD in medical microbiology.
“I am so excited to join Thalamos at such an important time,” Seager said. “Crisis mental health care is in the spotlight as an area of the NHS that needs urgent improvement and Mental Health Act reforms are firmly on the table after many years of waiting.”
“There is so much opportunity, working hand in hand with our clients, to make quick improvements before the legislation even goes through parliament. It’s crucial that we collectively join up care across the system – saving time for frontline staff, reducing errors and increase the speed of accessing services for patients when they are at their most vulnerable, while putting in place the infrastructure which will make the reforms easier to deliver.”
Seager’s Client Director hire caps a period of extensive team growth at Thalamos. Joining the highly experienced team led by co-founders and cousins Arden and Ross Tomison were hires across customer success, product development, commercial strategy and operations.
As the government begins to legislate on how it will begin a long-awaited reform to the Mental Health Act, Seager took some time to look at what mental and physical health equality could really look like in service of improving patient outcomes. Have a read of her article looking at the subject, where she also examined the impact system-wide digitisation could have.
