With a career dedicated to improving patient care and population health, Professor Frankie Swords serves as Executive Medical Director and a statutory member of the ICB Executive team. She provides clinical leadership across the system, ensuring services are safe, evidence-based and designed around local needs, with a strong focus on reducing inequalities.
Frankie continues to run weekly clinics, staying closely connected to frontline care and the experiences of patients and staff. That insight shapes her system role, where she leads clinical and professional leadership, population health management, medicines optimisation and pharmacy, alongside research and innovation. Together with the Executive Director of Nursing, she also oversees quality and patient experience at Board level. As Caldicott Guardian, she ensures patient data is used safely, ethically and only where it clearly benefits care.
Bringing clinicians together across primary and secondary care is a key part of her work, helping share learning and solve challenges across the system. She champions the use of data to target interventions where they make the greatest difference, and promotes research and innovation as practical ways to improve outcomes, staff experience and the long-term sustainability of services. Her leadership in medicines optimisation — including antimicrobial stewardship — supports safer prescribing while helping to protect the effectiveness of antibiotics for the future.
Frankie trained in Oxford and London, completed a PhD in north east London, and became a Consultant Physician and Endocrinologist at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital in 2008. Leadership roles followed at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital and then as Medical Director at Queen Elizabeth Hospital King’s Lynn, before she joined Norfolk and Waveney ICB in 2022. She is particularly proud of leading improvements in older people’s medicine and palliative care, guiding teams through the pressures of the pandemic, and introducing clinical pathways that help people access care more quickly, locally and closer to home where possible.
Her leadership is guided by fairness, kindness and honesty. Colleagues value her commitment to tackling inequality, listening with empathy and creating trust so people feel able to share ideas and shape solutions together.
Outside work, Frankie has three children, is learning French, enjoys playing the piano, and is a determined (if self-confessed slow) runner — grounded by a determination and strong belief in the NHS’s need to continually evolve and improve.