Alan
Maynard was educated at Calday Grange Grammar School and the Universities of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne (first class honours in economics, 1967) and York (BPhil in
economics, 1968). He taught
economics at the University of Exeter (1968-71) before moving to York to teach
economics (1971).
After 6 years of teaching
general economics and specialising in health and social policy, he was appointed
Founding Director of the Graduate Programme in Health Economics at York (1977
– 83). In 1983 he was appointed
Founding Director of the Centre for Health Economics (CHE) and, with colleagues,
developed it into the leading health economics research and policy centre in
Europe. In 1995 he became Chief
Executive of the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, but returned to academia
in 1996 to create the York Health Policy Group in the Department of Health
Studies in York.
During
his career as an academic he has been closely involved in NHS management and
policy making. He has been involved
in the local (York) NHS since 1983 as a member of a health authority and a Trust
board. Currently he is Chairman of
the York NHS Trust which provides acute care for the local population and has a
budget of £130M.
He
has been closely involved in initiating three significant NHS policy changes.
In the mid-1980s he proposed that NHS budgets be allocated by general
practitioners (the precursor of GP fund holding).
In May 1997 he proposed that pharmaceuticals should only be reimbursed by
the NHS if demonstrably cost effective and efficient.
This idea was developed in the Comprehensive Spending Review and
introduced as the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE).
Currently his policy focus is the reform of the consultant contract and
the systematic development by the medical profession of performance management.
In all these activities it has been remarkable how unwilling policy
makers have been to pilot and evaluate before system-wide adoption!
Health care reform is social experimentation with little evaluation.
In
addition to this national activity he has worked as a consultant for the World
Health Organisation, the UK Department for International Development, the World
Bank and the European Union on a variety of health care reform tasks in Cyprus,
Greece, Thailand, Botswana, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, China,
Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary and Russia.
He is an Honorary Professor, University of Aberdeen and a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. He lives in York and is married with 4 children and 3 grandchildren. His work email is akm3@york.ac.uk and his work telephone/fax are 0044 (0) 1904 433645/432496.