Network Core Staff

Core Staff

The Network has five Core Staff: Gordon Best, Maria Duggan, Sue Gallagher, Steve Pashley and Chris Spry with administrative support for the Core Staff and the Network provided by Nichola Nightingale. Collectively, they offer a wide range of skills and experience including an in depth understanding of the NHS as well as familiarity with and experience of, health care systems in a number of other countries. All of the Core Staff seek to work at the interface between useful theory and needed change. The Network also has a number of Associate members who are widely recognised as outstanding practitioners in their fields and/or are in a position to influence the policy climate in which member CEOs operate. Associate members regularly contribute to Network seminars, workshops as well as to work with members in the field.

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Gordon Best

Gordon Best is a founding director of the OD Partnerships Network (ODPN) a collaborative learning network consisting of approximately fifty subscribing U.K. and international health care organisations. The purpose of the network is to engage with and stimulate the individuals and organisations that belong to it so that they are better able to learn from one another, support one another and deliver needed change.
 
Prior to establishing ODPN in 1997, Gordon Best was the Director of the King’s Fund Management College.  Previous to joining the King’s Fund in 1981, Gordon held academic appointments at University College London, the University of Colorado Medical Centre and Guy’s Hospital Medical School.  Originally trained as an architect in the United States, he has also had extensive experience as a health planner and as a management consultant both within the UK and overseas.  He holds degrees in Operational Research, in Architecture and in Economics and has published extensively in all three fields. 
 
He acted as an official advisor on health issues to the Labour Party in the run up to the 1992 election and has advised Labour Shadow Ministers and Ministers on an ‘ad hoc’ basis since that time. He has taken part in a number of radio and television programmes concerned with health issues and the NHS and has been the focus of a BBC Panorama programme on health care reform.  In recent years, in addition to his work a Director of the OD Partnerships Network, he has acted as the personal advisor to a number of senior health service managers and policy makers in the UK as well as in Europe, the U.S.A. and Australasia. 

 

Maria Duggan

Maria currently has an extensive portfolio as an independent, health and social care policy analyst, organisational development consultant and researcher working on commissioned projects for the Department of Health in England, numerous national, regional and local government agencies in England and a range of international and national academic and research institutes and both statutory and independent health bodies and agencies.

In a lengthy career Maria has been a social work practitioner, an assistant director of social services, an academic in the field of social and health policy, an associate of the Kings Fund and the Nuffield Centre for Health and the Institute for Public Policy Research. Maria was the Director of Policy at the Association for Public Health until 2003.

She is particularly well known in the field of mental health policy and organisational development, having a lengthy association worked with the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health and the National Institute for Mental in England (NIMHE) and a wide range of national and local mental health agencies including the Royal Colleges and professional registration bodies.

Recent publications include:

Personality Disorder: No longer a diagnosis of exclusion: The personality disorder policy implementation guidance (DH) 2004

Breaking the Cycle of Rejection: the Personality Disorder Capabilities Framework (DH/ NIMHE) 2005

Releasing the Potential for the Public’s Health (2005) NHS Confederation, The Local Government Association and the UK Public Health association

Affiliations

  • Trustee of the National Heart Forum,
  • Non-executive director of the Whittington NHS Hospital trust
  • Honorary Policy Adviser to the UK Public Health Association
  • Member of ODP partnership Network and Health Directions Network
  • Honorary Principal Lecturer, Middlesex University
  • Accredited Expert Adviser: The Centre for Public Scrutiny
  • Improvement and Development Agency in Local Government

 

Sue Gallagher

Following a year working on a social service programme with the University of Bombay in India and a year as a UK manager of International Voluntary Service, Sue joined the NHS. She has worked for 27 years in the NHS. For 13 of these leading organisations - firstly, an acute hospital group, then a large mental health unit and, latterly, for 5 years to April 2002, as Chief Executive of Merton, Sutton and Wandsworth Health Authority leading a health community of 14 organisations, collaborating with 3 very different local authorities.

In 2002 faced with her 8th NHS reorganisation, Sue decided to use her expertise differently and to learn new skills to help top teams to succeed. She became an accredited executive coach and a master practitioner in NLP [neuro - linguistic programming] and an independent development consultant, helping individuals, teams and organisations to increase their effectiveness. Sue was also part-time Director of the DH Policy Collaborative, from 2002 to 2005, working with DH policy teams learning how to achieve excellence in policy making, in part by adapting and using service improvement   methodologies.

Sue has led many controversial service changes including the closure in 1981 of one of two national hospitals for women; and in the late 1980s the transformation of mental health services in partnership with local authorities and the independent sector, to create a comprehensive community network of supported housing,  work schemes, resource centres, legal advocacy and patients council services. In 2000, after much controversy and negotiation, Sue gained ministerial approval for a radical change in function for Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton and a state of the art PFI ambulatory care centre; and in 2002 for the only 2 borough PCT in London.  Sue’s consultancy and facilitation work covers a broad spectrum of strategic, clinical service, public health and more general issues. Coaching clients are from many different backgrounds.

Sue was a member of the first National Institute of Clinical Excellence Appraisal Committee. She was also a member of the National High Security Commissioning Board and the National Mansell Advisory Committee. She is an associate of the OD Partnership Network and has had 11 years as a board member of a Housing Association. Sue is married to a doctor and has 2 children.

 

Steve Pashley

Steve Pashley

Steve Pashley is a change management, strategy and organisation development consultant. His goal is to help senior managers and clinicians discover needed strategic change and manage it as well as possible.

Steve is a founding Director of the OD Partnerships Network (ODPN), who rejoined the Core Staff in late 2008. Prior to establishing ODPN in 1997, Steve was a Fellow in Organisation Development at the Kings Fund. He also worked, prior to this, an OD advisory capacity for a large US-based healthcare provider system.

Steve has extensive OD, strategy and change management experience, including:
  • providing strategic OD advice to Chief Executives and senior managers

  • advising and supporting change management programmes

  • developing OD strategies for organisations and directorates

  • designing and facilitating strategic learning experiences for a wide range of senior NHS managers and clinicians, judiciously blending a variety of tools and techniques

  • facilitating executive and management teams, NHS Boards and learning sets

He is also a co-founder of Knowledge Exchange www.theknowledgexchange.co.uk – a peer-to-peer online support network with more than 6,800 NHS managers in membership. More information about Steve can be found on his personal website www.stevepashley.co.uk.

 

Chris Spry

In a 34 year career in NHS management, Chris Spry spent 23 years as a Chief Executive, in Nottingham, Newcastle, London (as Regional General Manager of South West Thames and then Regional Director of South Thames) and Glasgow. His experience involved a range of responsibilities which included:

  • Opening Queen’s Medical Centre – a new Teaching Hospital in Nottingham – and managing the transition from the previous pattern of services being provided by three associated hospitals.
  • Significant change in the model of Mental Health services in Nottingham and Newcastle.
  • Developing (and gaining Ministerial approval for) a reconfiguration of acute hospital services in Glasgow (from 6 acute hospitals to three in-patient hospitals and two Ambulatory Hospitals without beds).
  • Leadership of the Greater Glasgow Drug Action Team, tackling addiction problems in the city of epic proportions.
  • Revival of the London Ambulance Service after 15 years of managerial neglect.
  • Creating a platform for significantly more effective collaboration with six local authorities in Greater Glasgow on the range of services involved in community care.
In this pattern of experience the touchstone was the capacity to create mutual commitment to strategically significant change among disparate partners – especially primary and secondary care clinicians, trade unions, and politicians. This is complemented by skills in recognising underlying patterns and influences and being able to distil complex situations into accessible description. Since joining the OD Partnership Network in 2001 he has worked with Network members and other organisations on a range of issues, including:
  • local approaches to strategic change,
  • relationships between Trusts and PCTs,
  • development of clinical and hospital networks,
  • team building,
  • management development,
  • relationships between managers and clinicians,
  • deficit recovery and organisational turnaround,
  • individual coaching, Learning Set facilitation, and organisation of workshops and Open Space events
He was awarded the CBE in 2002 and a Visiting Professorship at Glasgow University in 2001. Since March 2005 he has been a Non-Executive Director of Dorset County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.


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