Adam Cairns
Hope. Inspiration. Creativity.
Adam is passionate about nature and is happiest when at last swifts return in the summer or when flights of geese come in on a cool west wind over the marshes.
He brings high level corporate expertise together with creativity as a poet and photographer and former CEO of some of the largest public healthcare systems in the UK and Qatar.
Career Highlights
Adam spent his career working in healthcare systems in the United Kingdon NHS and in Qatar (the Hamad Medical Corporation). He served on several boards either as CEO or as Director. He pioneered very early adoption of telehealth in the UK and set up the country’s first telehealth service for the high-security prison estate in the early noughties. He was a founder director of Medilink a healthcare innovation hub. He writes and teaches poetry and ran poetry workshops for the RSPB in 2023 and is an inaugural Board Member for Poetry for Planet. He is widley published in litearary journals and is working on a first collection cheerfully titled ‘Extinctions’. Adam is based in the UK.
CEO Cardiff and Vale University Health Board
One of the largest and most complex healthcare organisations in the United Kingdom. He was also Visiting Professor at Cardiff University Medical School.
Poetry
MA in Poetry Writing with Distinction in 2023 from Newcastle University and The Poetry School, London.
Poetry Works
CEO Poetry Works helping organisations to find language their audiences notice, enjoy, use and remember.
Find out how a near death experience at the height of his career brought him home to himself.
After working as a high-level healthcare executive and visiting professor in the UK and the Middle East for 35 years, and while I was leading one of the largest and most complex healthcare organisations in the UK, I collapsed at home. I was unconscious for over forty minutes. Rushed to one of my own hospitals, top specialists worked on me to identify the problem. Was it a tumour, heart failure or neurological damage? After two weeks of intensive investigation they came to my bedside to tell me – they had nothing. There was no apparent reason why I had come so close to death.
I was shocked that my body could betray me like this. It took me months to come to grips with it, and it resulted in a seismic shift. I began thinking differently about work. I also questioned why I had allowed my creative talents and my love of the natural world to take second place, or even no place in the stress and weight of being responsible for so much and so many lives. I had forgotten to be responsible for my own life.
I changed my whole working style as CEO. I revised my focus towards medium and long-term strategy and created airspace between myself and the day-to-day pressure by appointing a Chief Operating Officer. Not only did it mean I was able to live more of my life for myself, but it made me a more effective CEO.
Five years later, having achieved all of my goals, I left the health care sector and began a new career as a poet. I started with gaining a prestigious MA in Poetry Writing and my work has since been featured in many literary journals and anthologies. I am now putting together my first collection.
But then I realised being a poet was not enough. I saw that poetry was not only an art form but also a thinking and writing tool. So I set up Poetry Works, a unique business that brings the skills, tools and capabilities of poetry to businesses and organisations to find a language that their clients remember, use and enjoy. It brings all of my skills, experience and creative talents together.
Today, I am living my best life which includes asking myself how can I help others to make similar life-enhancing adjustments to their work — just without the near death drama.
