16. Julie Moore, UHB

Julie Moore is chief executive of University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, one of the largest hospital trusts in the country, but as a teenager, her ambitions were more towards a senior position in Nasa than on the NHS.

When she was seriously ill as a teenager, her personal experience of the NHS - and the effect its people had on her as a patient - changed not only her career, but her life.

So she ditched her plans to study astrophysics at university and did a nursing degree instead.
Her first job was as a nurse at a hospital in Leeds in the early 80s where she spent ten years in clinical practice before entering nurse management.

At that time, her view of the NHS was that most of the staff were "fantastic" and "committed", but working in institutions that were growing tired and, in some cases, unfit for purpose, with no investment in buildings and the environment.

During her time as nurse manager and later nursing director, she did an MA in Health Services Studies at Leeds University and was seconded to work at the Department of Health on developing nursing roles.
She soon saw the light and after a year in general management, in 1998, became a director in the newly-merged Leeds Teaching Hospitals' Trust.

She then moved to Birmingham in 2002 to become the executive director of operations at University Hospital Birmingham, where she was responsible for the day-to-day running of Selly Oak and the Queen Elizabeth.

In 2006 she was appointed chief executive of the country's 10th biggest trust, one of only two women in charge of a large teaching hospital, nationwide.

She said the privileged position had given her the ability to have more of an influence in improving care, although often hampered by a forest of targets, inspections and bureaucracy.

Last November, UHB, along with the University of Birmingham, launched the Birmingham Clinical Research Academy which aims to become the UK's Harvard turning the science into new treatments for patients, and then just last month, a partnership, led again by UHB and UoB, made it the first trust in the West Midlands and only one of seven in the country to be successfully awarded £10 million in funding to become a centre of ex-cellence for health research.

Its planned new super hospital, which is being built on the current Queen Elizabeth site, will have 1,213 beds, the largest critical care unit in Europe, and will be able to treat 21 per cent more patients, meaning UHB will have some of the lowest waiting times in Britain.