Bevan Fellow
Paul is passionate about everything that constitutes positive change. He currently works across Hywel Dda UHB as a General Physician in Acute, GIM, Diabetes and Endocrinology. He has held many formal and informal leadership roles over the last 20 years both local to Hywel Dda and nationally at the National Collaborative Commissioning Unit (NCCU; now merged into JCC) where he was Associate Clinical Director of the National Programme Unscheduled Care (NPUC; the forerunner the current National 6 Goals Programme). He also currently represents colleagues on both the BMA WCC and was recently elected as Chair the Hywel Dda LNC. His longstanding interests in self and Organisational Development (OD), complex social change, critical systems thinking, complexity theory, transdisciplinarity, adult learning and adult development theory have carried Paul for many years now on a scholarly meta-exploration of what exactly is transformational change and how can this be best achieved within our Health and Social Care systems in Wales. Alongside his Bevan Commission work, he is deeply invested in several transformation projects in his local Health Board area. Also networked nationally and with active work-streams across the Value Based Healthcare and Bevan Exemplar programmes, he is a strong advocate for Human Learning Systems and Asset Based Community Development and promotes everything through dialogic OD processes, relationship building and whole systems collaboration. He has links internationally that relate to his developing interests in Critical Realism. Dialectical thinking and constructivist adult development theories.
The title for Paul’s Bevan Fellowship is Stewarding intentional systems transformation; & exploration associated complex dynamics for success.
Paul’s Bevan Fellowship builds on work already undertaken with others as Bevan Exemplar and Bevan Influencer. Success in complex (social) change requires a Public Sector shift towards both the process-relational and lifespan developmental. This is no simple undertaking in a world where collectively we struggle to comprehend complexity (C), steer away from uncertainty (U), actively avoid volatility (V) and dismiss ambiguity (A); and in so-doing delimit our development. People are our greatest assets; human agency our massive and predominantly untapped complexity-busting potential. Our current overbearing health and care realities, our local part the VUCA world, demands nothing short our individual and collective bests. Yet best practice is contingent a paradoxical mix of (prior) knowing and active new learning; both readily dismissed in ‘worlds’ where humans are simply viewed as cogs in the machines, servants to the whole. Our project here, to describe and explicate these differences both in reference our own evolving work and in context the wider meta-theoretical and transdisciplinary know-how already out-there. Organisational approaches to complexity really matter. Our focus to make the process-relational and developmental of transformational change, the otherwise too confusing and too complex, more accessible for all; and in so-doing simultaneously address many of the uncertainties associated with issues such as ‘spread’ and ‘scale’.
“Health & Social Care cannot continue unchanged and/or un-transformed. Our own work already goes back many years both as individual stories and collective endeavours; has roots our all as much it serves our own needs, benefits our organisations as much the people they exist to serve. We aim, with Bevan fellowship, platform and organising support to help others recapture own aspects this wider ‘meaning’ and ‘very human purpose’.
There is complicated theory into practice to share, much needing translating across disciplines into the transdisciplinary as we go. Our own insights, quantitative and qualitative gains, to be inter-weaved with so much we have (actively sought and) learned from others through direct collaboration and from published works.
We are deliberately succeeding ‘our best’; where best implies also our best achievements in prior knowing; we weave forth as a collaborative actively practising and learning together into the unknown, the far from agreement and far from certainty, otherwise known as complexity. Through the Bevan Fellowship processes we hope to also be able to achieve even more of what is required and, perhaps most important of all, make more available and more accessible for all.”