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I have a different take on this. I don't know this journalist. However, people who chair or lead such important reviews and enquiries need to be people who are very sharp, have the strength of character to ask the very awkward question and be able to judge the authenticity of the reply. You really don't have to be a nurse to reviewing nursing or a doctor to review medical practice, but you do need to be capable of understanding what people are saying to you. Also, in selecting people to take a lead in these types of review there is a need, I think, to have an eye on the outcome. If you ask a lawyer to do a review, he or she may understand the answers to questions but will see them in lawyers terms. Ditto for grocers. A journalist is normally widely inquisitive, and will gain meaning from answers that are more broadly understood, and may well be more sensitive to influences as a whole, rather than seeking a specific form of answer.
To me this review is pretty straight forward. Providing health services to individuals requires someone to be attentive to the individual as a whole whilst the specialists get on with whatever they have to do. Being attentive to the person as a whole is a really demanding on intelligence, emotional intelligence, perception, empathy and attentiveness. On top are skills. Being attentive to others is often really difficult, particularly as the trick is to ensure that your attentiveness is felt by the person to whom you are being attentive. Not easy. Many managers can't do it. Most clinicians can do it for a short time. They, of course, haven't applied to do a job of nursing, so no one would necessarily expect them to be able to be attentive to the whole person. But someone has to be, and nurses who do this brilliantly abound in the NHS, speed recovery with their attentiveness, and make the frightening experience of being in the hands of other professionals more palatable. Why they are paid at the lower end of the spectrum, God alone knows. Or a journalist, as they are getting closer to Godliness (aside from the odd scandal or two or three).