Dr Patricia Oakley is a Strategic Service and Workforce Policy Analyst and Development Specialist and a Teaching and Research Fellow at King’s College, London University.
Dr. Oakley has over 35 years health and public service experience in both operational and policy research and development areas. 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. She has also worked with senior Strategic Health Authority, Local Authority and Primary Care Trust staff, and GP Practices, to develop their infrastructures of skills, knowledge and processes to make local commissioning schemes work in practice based on her work with one of the original GP multi-fund pilots in the early 1990s.
In the last 20 years, Dr. Oakley has served as non-executive director on the English National Board for Nurses, Midwives and Health Visitors and as the elected President of the Association of Healthcare of Human Resource Managers. In addition, she has been a member of the government’s NHS Task Force looking at good practices in staff involvement, and a Specialist Advisor to both the House of Commons Select Committee on Health and the Scottish Executive’s Integrated Workforce Planning Group.
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 Masters 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. She is a Teaching and Research Fellow in The Management Department at King’s College, London University which is part of the School of Social and Public Policy. More recently, 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.
Dr. Patricia Oakley is one of the founding Directors of Practices Made Perfect Ltd., where she is a workforce planning and policy research and development specialist. Practices Made Perfect Ltd. works with public service organisations to help them develop their service strategies and workforce development plans. The main areas of specialist research are labour market and education trends, training and skill mix issues, and the effects of the changing legal, regulatory and commercial pressures on future skills deployment and staffing profiles.
Current areas of work include:
Genomics Strategy.
England’s healthcare science workforce policies.
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.
and small businesses) on health service delivery, and the implications for the future of professional groups in
the 21st Century.
assessment at King’s College, the LSE and the RCP-Birkbeck College Clinicians’ Leadership Programme.
