Muir Gray entered the Public Health Service in Oxford in 1972 after qualifying in medicine in Glasgow. He is a consultant in public health.
He has been working with both NHS England and Public Health England with the aim of increasing value for both populations and individuals and published How To Get Better Value Healthcare in 2007. The means of doing this through Systems and Personalisation is now called Population Healthcare and the aim of population healthcare is to maximise value and equity by focusing not on institutions, specialties or technologies, but on populations defined by a common symptom such as breathlessness, condition such as type 1 or Type 2 Diabetes or by a common characteristic, such as multiple morbidity.
Recently he has returned to his first public health mission – preventing the changes we assume are due to ageing and disease by getting the right attitude and fighting back against an environment that makes us inactive. His key books include Sod70! And, with Diana Moran, Sod Sitting, Get Moving!
Muir is the director of the Optimal Ageing Programme at Oxford and is part of a group setting up a national network for Living Longer Better whose mission is to bring about a cultural revolution in the way society rises to the challenge of population ageing.
