Meet Our Senior Leadership Team

Bruce Thew
Chairman

Bruce has over 40 years’ experience building technology-enabled businesses globally. He began his career at PCL, a technology outsourcing business in sales, rising to the level of Group Managing Director. Between 1997 and 2005, he was president of Ceridian Group’s international HR and payroll business; building from 800 to 2,500 colleagues across the world.

Bruce currently invests in high growth businesses as Chair, coaching CEOs and their senior team on growth strategies. He is Chair of Liaison Group Ltd, Safeguard World International, and JA Ltd.

He became Liaison Group’s Chairman in 2008, with a passion to help the NHS save money and release time for better patient care. During his tenure, Liaison has grown from 35 NHS professionals to 385 experts, and saved the NHS over £1billion.

Andrew Armitage
Chief Executive Officer

Andrew joined Liaison in 1994 as a VAT Advisor and became Managing Director in 2008, following on to become CEO in 2019. He was instrumental in expanding our services to include forensic cost reduction services in 2009, Direct Engagement in 2011, and Continuing Healthcare in 2019.

He continues to oversee the expansion of Liaison’s Workforce, Financial and Care services, and works with our clients to transform the healthcare economy, whilst also spearheading the deployment of the Liaison Group services.

Alison Jones
Managing Director, Liaison Financial

A long-standing employee, Alison joined Liaison in January 1995 as a VAT Advisor, advising trusts on a wide variety of tax issues as well as carrying out compliance reviews and training courses. From 2008, Alison led the VAT division and was instrumental in continually growing the NHS VAT business and expanding other financial saving services as a specialist to the NHS. With a career in the financial sector including experience in management accounting, debt control and fraud analysis, Alison is well placed, with her trusted team, to develop and deliver solutions to help the healthcare economy.

Alison is now responsible for the Liaison Financial business, overseeing and managing our unrivalled UK-wide team of specialist VAT advisors and forensic saving consultants, as well as driving the development of new financial services.

Vanessa Forster
Managing Partner, Liaison Workforce

Vanessa joined Liaison in 2011, she has been instrumental in expanding Liaison’s healthcare offering and helped the NHS to change the way they look at temporary workers by leading agency sourced employment into trusts and health boards. To keep leading the way, we benefit from strategic advice from a group of advisors that Vanessa oversees who are either still active in the NHS or recently retired. It is this unrivalled access and penetration of the NHS that is enabling Vanessa to identify opportunities for partnerships and investments that benefit the healthcare economy and add value to our business.

Prior to Liaison, Vanessa worked in a number of sales and marketing roles in the recruitment and managed service sector with Randstad, helping to re-engineer the way workforces were structured, and brings this extensive experience to her role as Managing Partner at Liaison Workforce.

Judith Shaw
Managing Partner, Liaison Workforce

With a strong HR background of over 35 years, Judith joined Liaison in 2012. Responsible for the Workforce business from client acquisition to solution and service development and implementation. She has extensive experience of implementing workforce solutions and services in both private and public sectors across a range of industries, including healthcare.

As a Managing Partner, working with an experienced multidisciplinary team ranging from procurement, commercial and product development, through to customer operations, as well as a national network of workforce advisors, Judith has grown the business over recent years. With the breadth of solutions and services on offer the business is well placed to deliver National programmes across the NHS.

Heidi Lopez
Managing Partner, Liaison Workforce

Heidi joined Liaison in 2014 from Ceridian, where she spent 18 years in a range of strategic planning and senior business analyst roles.

Passionate about using data to drive decision making, as Managing Partner for Liaison Workforce, Heidi guides research and strategic planning activities, as well as the development of product and technology for the business.

Phil Church
Managing Director, Liaison Care

Following a successful career in the Telecoms and IT sector, Phil was introduced to healthcare over twenty years ago, where he focused on turnaround, transformation and operational delivery. In that time, his roles have taken him up and down the country, working with Acute Trusts, CCGs, Care and Community Trusts, and Primary Care teams.

Phil is a CHC specialist who understands the delicate balance between CHC and Social Care, and has been heavily involved in the running, optimisation and efficiency of CHC delivery throughout his time commissioning healthcare.

Phil joined the Liaison Group as a Special Advisor in January 2020, before moving to lead Liaison Care in 2020. He has overseen large and repeated year on year growth in the business which now has a 40% market share and customers across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Ian Child
Procurement and Performance Director

Ian is a Chartered Accountant, and joined Liaison in 2014 having spent 30 years in senior finance roles across public practice, private business and the public sector in healthcare.

Ian leads on Liaison’s financial processes, as well as supporting the workforce division with commercial and procurement decisions. He is also a non-executive director at St Martin of Tours Housing Association.

Mike Egerton
Chief Marketing Officer

Mike is an experienced marketer in the field of healthcare, having been Head of Marketing at a healthcare workforce solutions provider since 2009, before moving to lead Liaison Group’s marketing team as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) in 2020.

Working with a varied team of marketing specialists, Mike oversees all marketing and communications for both Liaison Group and its divisions.

Matthew Willman
Director of Governance and IT

Matthew joined Liaison in 2011, at that time heading up our emerging Forensics division. He then moved to lead the development on our market-leading TempRE application and, more latterly, our development of ‘NHS at Work’ – a rostering solution for the NHS, by the NHS.

Matthew now leads our internal IT and Governance groups to ensure we maintain highest levels of compliance and security as well as maximising and optimising technology to enable our business to deliver services to our clients.

Matthew has a detailed understanding and knowledge of the healthcare sector and its current and future technologies, and is proud to be surrounded by a highly skilled and creative team. He is passionate and committed to delivering world-class solutions to help the NHS be more operationally effective.

Corinne Spillane
Chief People Officer

Corinne joined Liaison Group in 2018. With widespread experience, she manages the HR function supporting the whole group; helping to develop a core group of HR professionals to proactively support the varied needs of the business.

Corinne’s career and experience spans financial and professional services, encompassing a broad cross-section of specialist areas. Whilst her background is in generalist HR, she has experience in all aspects of the function. She is also an active volunteer supporting local high schools as an Enterprise Adviser. As the pandemic proved, no two days are the same, however whilst always looking to improve from an HR and employee engagement perspective, one of HR’s successes in recent years has been to be awarded and maintain the Best Companies accreditation as a Top 100 employer.