Tony Matthews

Tony is responsible for non-clinical and at-scale operational services for our central area and has organisation-wide lead responsibility for customer financial services and back office primary care support.

Tony has more than 27 years of experience working in the NHS. A former primary care trust, area team and CCG finance director, Tony is a leading commissioner and expert in financial strategy and reporting. He has worked at a national level with NHS England and with multiple partners across health systems.

He ensures a relentless focus on service delivery and is constantly looking to improve services for customers and patients alike. Tony encourages staff to adopt the same approach and is always keen to ensure that customers’ needs are met as far as possible.

Tony has a track record of delivering financial targets. In his role as area team finance director, he successfully delivered balanced financial positions, amounting to £1.8billion, across three primary care trusts. Tony also delivered surplus targets for the two CCGs he was responsible for.

He uses his broad range of experiences, from across the healthcare sector, to turn theory into practice. He can convert commissioning plans and intentions into financial and contractual metrics, and produce integrated activity and financial plans and reports. He has delivered QIPP (quality, innovation, productivity and prevention) programmes at primary care trust, CCG and area team level.

Tony is proficient at working across health economies and helping to broker conversations between partners to achieve system goals and objectives. He made significant contributions to a whole system redesign programme, encompassing a new hospital, and enhanced primary and community care infrastructure. This resulted in hospital activity being performed in primary and community settings instead.

Tony previously supported the national turnaround programme with NHS England specialised commissioning, successfully targeting delivery of £300million worth of QIPP savings in 2014/15. He has also led the financial turnaround of a primary care trust.

More recently Tony has led on our response to support the Carter (productivity) agenda and the development of innovative solutions to support and enhance the infrastructure within primary care.