Dr. Patricia Oakley, Director, Practices Made Perfect Ltd., is a recently retired Strategic Service and Workforce Policy Analyst, and Workforce Research Fellow at King’s College, London University. She is now writing historical fiction novels about organisational politics and sociopaths at work in hospitals.
Previous posts include:
• Adviser to the Chief Scientific Officer’s Healthcare Scientists Workforce Policy Group.
• Coordinator of the Healthcare Science Doctoral Programme, King’s College, London University.
• Chair, Workforce Planning Policy Stream, Minister’s Next Stage Review (2007-2009).
• Tutor of public health and public policy post-graduate students in management and strategic workforce risk assessment at King’s College, the LSE and the RCP-Birkbeck College Clinicians’ Leadership Programme.
• Lead Tutor, NHS Wales’ National Leadership and Innovation Agency for Healthcare.
• Non-Executive Director of the English National Board for Nursing and Midwifery.
• Special Adviser to the House of Commons Select Committee on Health.
• Special Adviser to the Scottish Executive’s Integrated Workforce Planning Group.
• President of the Association of Healthcare Human Resource Managers (AHPM).
Awarded AHPM's Lifetime Achievement Award 2016
Key areas of recent work include:
i) Supporting DH, HEE and NHS England’s Policy Programmes: Children’s and Young People’s Services Workforce Review; 7 Day Services Workforce Review; Cardiac Care and Echo Services Workforce Review; the Genomics Workforce Strategy; and the role of predictive analytics in scheduling urgent care.
ii) Coordinating the DH’s Healthcare Science Doctoral Programme at King’s College, London, to support the development of England’s healthcare science workforce modelling procedures, policies and analytical methodology.
iii) Building, with specialist colleagues, strategic workforce risk assessment and planning models and preparing strategic workforce investment plans for senior management teams and national policy-makers, e.g. medical, pharmacy, midwifery, nursing, management and scientific workforces.
iv) Developing evidence for national-level policies in assessing the potential impact of commercial enterprises (multi-national and small businesses) on health service delivery, and the implications for the future of professional groups in the 21st Century.
v) Supporting local board and clinical leadership development programmes and delivering policy masterclasses as part of local staff and cross-sector leadership development programmes.
Dr. Oakley has over 40 years’ health and public service experience in both operational management and policy research and development. She has worked extensively with national policy-makers and Trust boards, executive directors and senior clinicians, and with service managers and clinical practitioners, in developing their strategies to deliver affordable public services. She has worked in management and organisational development; restructuring organisations and clinical care systems; designing and delivering skill-mix reviews and reprofiling programmes; conducting value for money audits and managing subsequent change programmes; and preparing strategic workforce and education and training investment plans.
A production and radiopharmacist, and subsequently clinical pharmacist by background, Dr. Oakley was a London Chief Pharmacist from 1981-1987 when she moved to the former North-West Thames Regional Health Authority where she was Head of the Manpower & Pay Policy Unit. She specialised in economics, corporate finance, and management accounts in the Master’s Programme at London Business School; and she has a doctorate in medical politics and conflict from London University’s Birkbeck College’s Organisational Psychology Department. Dr. Oakley recently retired from her Teaching post at King’s College, London University, but continues as a Workforce Research Fellow at King’s Business School. To specialise in Medical Humanities, Dr. Oakley was awarded a Diploma in the History of Medicine by The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and has an MA in Victorian Studies from Birkbeck’s 19th Century research unit.
Dr. Patricia Oakley is one of the founding Directors of Practices Made Perfect Ltd., where she continues to work as an adviser in workforce planning and policy development. Her first historical fiction novel about 19th Century medical and nursing politics in a London Teaching Hospital will be available in late 2020 from www.patoakleypublishing.london.
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