Dunhill Medical Trust

About us You can find links to our strategic aims and objectives here, along with details of our people (staff, committee members and trustees) and our history. Our aims, vision and strategic priorities We invest in those who have great ideas and methods for improving the health and well-being of older people and in making the connections which can help them to flourish. Our people The Trust is run by a staff team of six, led by the Chief Executive who reports to the Board of Trustees. There are currently ten Board members who can each serve up to two four year terms of office and meet four times per year. Reporting to the Board are three Committees: Research Grants Committee, Social Financing Committee and Investment Committee. Trustee committee members are assisted by a number of independent advisers who have professional expertise appropriate to the Committee they serve. Our history Herbert E Dunhill died in November 1950 leaving £250,000 from his personal estate in Charitable Trust for medical research into tuberculosis, the cause of ill-health throughout much of his life. His niece, Mary Dunhill Lane, was appointed one of the original Trustees and it was largely her vision that drove the Charity until her death in 1988. Her daughter, Kay Glendinning, continued her work and was Executive Director from 1988 until April 2005 when she joined the Board in a non executive capacity. In 2019, she stepped down as a Trustee and became the Trust’s first Patron. Kay recalls returning to work from maternity leave to ask if she could resume the job she had had on the shop floor in the family business since leaving school at 17. She was greeted with a plan hatched by her mother to work in her Uncle Herbert’s expanding charity, directed to address herself to a toppling pile of paper and issued with an instruction to go out and learn about medicine! This she did, finding herself very quickly in an operating theatre at Guy’s Hospital watching an operation on a baby. She admits to fainting but never looking back. By the 1980s, the Trust was receiving an increasing number of grant applications related to issues associated with ageing and the care of older people. Although there was a clear case of unmet need, many applications could not be supported because they fell outside the original aims of the Trust. To rectify this, the Trust Deed was formally amended and in 1986 the Charity was renamed The Dunhill Medical Trust and was registered with the Charity Commission (Charity no. 294286). On 1st April 2011, The Dunhill Medical Trust also became a charitable company limited by guarantee (registered company number: 07472301; registered charity number: 1140372). The Trust’s assets, now worth c.£160M today, are invested in a range of funds in the global stock markets, details of which can be found in the annual report and accounts. The Trustees and staff take their responsibilities regarding protection of the endowment and the environmental, social and governance aspects very seriously, so our investment policy remains under regular review and investment in “tobacco stocks” is a specific policy exclusion. The Trust has no connection with the tobacco industry and complies fully with the Joint Protocol of Cancer Research and Universities UK on Tobacco Industry Funding to Universities (2004).