Hiten qualified as a medical doctor at Leicester Medical School in 1988 where he developed an interest in public health. After training in various hospital specialties and general practice, Hiten followed his ambition to train in public health starting in 1993. He became a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health in 2006. He is currently a public health consultant based at Lambeth Council but also works closely with Lambeth Together integrated care system partners and NHS commissioners as well as providers of services such as, Lambeth GPs, and Guys & St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust.

Hiten is also passionate about training in public health and is an educational supervisor to public health trainees in Lambeth. His interests include the use of public health data and intelligence in understanding the health status of populations, improving health and wellbeing outcomes, and reducing health inequalities; health care public health – particularly prevention of long conditions and the biological, metabolic, and social/economic risk factors associated with these. He provides public health leadership on the local commissioning, implementation, and improvements in key public health programmes (e.g., diabetes eye screening, NHS Health Checks and the prevention and effective management of long-term conditions).

His research interests include collaborating with local academics to evaluate some of these programmes. He was recently a co-investigator in a four-year research programme funded by the Guys and St Thomas’s Charity into the epidemiology, economics and qualitative aspects of multiple long-term conditions which led to several publications. He is currently the chief investigator for the NIHR funded Lambeth Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC) to develop a research infrastructure in local government looking at reducing health inequalities through action on wider health determinants. At a national level Hiten was a core member of the Public Health Advisory Committee at the National Institute of Clinical and Health Excellence (NICE) for 7 years. He was invited to be involved in a national review of the production, presentation and use of NICE products focusing initially on type 2 diabetes prevention and care pathway where he provided public health advice. Previously he was also involved in national peer review processes for diabetes retinal eye screening programmes.