Kishan Patel

Kishan is a practising NHS doctor and a graduate of Imperial College London.
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He spearheaded the organisation's founding by driving towards the change he knew was so desperately needed.
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Kishan has led the organisation in several areas, including entrepreneurially as the founding CEO of the CIC, strategically as the founding chair of trustees of the CIO and operationally across our prevention and awareness activities in diverse communities, research & evaluation and medical education. 
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Since the organisation's inception, Kishan has yet to take any financial or material compensation. Furthermore, he donates all income related to his work around gambling harm to the charity. Towards his ambition of developing an independent charity that is sustainable and to minimise any apparent or actual conflicts of interest, Kishan has also yet to take any funds from the charity for the costs he has personally incurred in travel, accommodation, equipment, or otherwise.
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Kishan is powerfully motivated by his childhood experience of gambling harm, which he continues to feel the impacts and effects of today. Gambling harm meant that his family struggled to afford basic necessities as they lived in pay-day poverty, which ultimately led to crippling effects on quality of life and domestic conflicts.

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Kishan lost his dad at age 15 and consequently struggled with bereavement for several years, which disrupted his studies and ambition towards helping others through medicine. 

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Despite presenting to healthcare professionals for a range of physical and mental health issues throughout his childhood and adolescence, Kishan had never been asked if gambling harm could be underlying these presentations. It was in his fourth year of medical school that he first came across gambling as a 'hidden epidemic' while undertaking extracurricular research into neglected health issues.
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Upon confronting his repressed experiences of gambling harm, Kishan knew he had to do something to change the status quo and challenge the prevailing industry narratives that minimise, deflect and prevent gambling harm from being recognised and tackled as a significant public health and safeguarding issue.
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Kishan is one of the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Fellows and benefits from experiences in strategy consulting, health-based research, health tech, start-ups, and financial services.

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He has also succeeded in growing and leading the student charity group Imperial College Friends of MSF. He was awarded The Diana Award for his initiative to build a first-of-its-kind ecosystem to promote humanitarian prototyping and entrepreneurship at Imperial College London.
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He is currently the Chair of the Board of Trustees and CEO for Gambling Harm UK.