Location

1 Wellington Square, Oxford OX1 2JA

Biography

I studied biochemistry at Oxford including a stint researching T Cell responses at the Institute for Molecular Medicine under Professor Andrew McMichael.  I was a diplomat in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with a posting to Istanbul and a period running the briefing unit for ministers negotiating at EU Council meetings.  Between 2004 and 2014 I worked at management consultancy McKinsey & Company.  In 2012, I established a consulting and training company, Revington Associates.  I live in Somerset with my family.

I teach on the Masters in Surgical Science and Practice course, which is offered as a collaboration between the Nuffield Deaprtment of Surgery and the Department of Continuing Education.  I also teach on the Postgraduate Certificate in Patient Safety course, which is taken by physicians, nurses and other clinicians as well as surgeons.

I am interested in how healthcare professionals can lead positive change in their organisations.  Often surgeons and hospital clinical staff identify aspects of care or organisational processes (managing theatres; conveying information between departments; arranging efficient discharge) which seem in sore need of improvement.  Sometimes solutions seem fairly obvious.  Yet bringing about that change is somehow harder than they thought it might be.  Why is that and what can we do about it?  This is at the heart of what I aim to help participants learn about.  

The domains that this takes us into include organisational psychology, for example what motivates people in the workplace and why people may appear to resist change; operations management, which includes the science and mathematics of designing productive systems;  and project management, the pragmatic art of getting things done in complex organisations.

Course graduates apply what they learn to problems in their clincical work.  An orthopaedic surgeon reduced delays in her outpatient clinic so that patients no longer brought books with them in expectation of hours in the waiting room.  Others have focused on safety improvements, such as earlier identification of risk factors in post-partum mothers or getting patients with serious fractures to theatre faster. 

In addition to my academic teaching, I run learning programmes in healthcare provider organisations themed around quality improvement and leadership development.