James Mountford joined NHS England and NHS Improvement in August 2020 as Director of National Improvement Strategy. In 2015 he joined the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust as Director of Quality, leading a programme to embed quality and value improvement into routine practice and to ensure improvement efforts address what matters most to staff, as well as patients and populations.

James worked initially as an NHS doctor, then in consulting. From 2005-2007, he was a Commonwealth Fund/Health Foundation Harkness Fellow based at Massachusetts General Hospital, and at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), both in Boston, USA. Before moving to the Royal Free, James was Director of Quality at UCLPartners, an academic health sciences partnership serving a population of 3million in and around London.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal BMJLeader and sits on the board of AQuA, the improvement partnership based in north-west England.