Dr Taj Hassan is a consultant in Emergency Medicine at the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and also President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (2016 – 2019). He was elected in 2018 to represent Europe on the Board of the International Federation for Emergency Medicine.

He has previously held posts at NHS Improvement as Associate Medical Director for Urgent & Emergency Care, national RCEM Lead for Ambulatory Emergency Care and co-author of the national Directory of Ambulatory Emergency Care, Vice President of the RCEM and was Director of eLearning at the College (2005-2012) leading on the development of the eLearning platform that is now RCEMLearning.

He has led on the development of the new strategy RCEM Vision 2020 which focuses on the key themes of Staffing, Systems & Support. His major interests include EM system design, creating workforce resilience & sustainability and developing leadership skills for emergency physicians.

He chaired the College’s landmark strategy in 2013 – Creating successful, satisfying and sustainable careers in Emergency Medicine. Internationally, he has been involved in running leadership training programmes for the International Federation of EM (IFEM) and was Chair of the IFEM group that developed the position paper on Sustainable working Practices for the Emergency Physician in 2014.

He has also recently led initiatives to help develop Emergency Medicine in his country of birth, Pakistan as well as supporting other countries where the specialty is still evolving.