HealthManagement, Volume 15 - Issue 1, 2015
1. What are your key areas of interest and research?
Finding innovative ways to improve the public’s health by building the capacity and capability of the wider workforce and measuring the impact of community-based preventative work so that the best practice can be easily disseminated.
2. What are the major challenges in your field?
a) getting prevention to the the top of the healthcare policy agenda; until we do life will only get more challenging for those in healthcare management.
b) Developing a holistic healthcare system which is patient-centric.
c) Motivating and supporting the healthcare workforce.
3. What is your top management tip?
Always ask the frontline workforce what works and what doesn’t; too often they are left out of the decision-making process with resulting poor outcomes.
4. Your career highlight?
Initiating a national US Summit on Learning Disabilities in Washington DC, which led to positive long term effects for vulnerable children (the No Child Left Behind Act).
5. If you had not chosen this career path you would have become a…?
I was always interested in people and issues so possibly politics.
6. Your leisure interests?
Hiking, skiing, theatre, spending time with friends, which usually involves good food.
7. What is your favourite quote?
Margaret Atwood, the Canadian writer, said in one of her books that ‘potentiality has a shelf life’; this always reminds me of the urgent need to make sure that all our young people are given the education, help and support that they need to succeed.
