Alison Ryan
I first dipped my toes into Bath’s renowned waters in the 1980s. My second career, as CEO of a national charity based in Frome was just starting and I wanted to expand my contacts. Becoming first Secretary and then Chair of the Bath Branch of the Institute of Management seemed as good a way as any. Those were indeed the Dark Ages for senior working women; the Institute addressed me as Mr Ryan from the moment I became Chair.
Before that I had spent an interesting nine years in the UK Atomic Energy Authority putting my skills as an economist to practice, latterly selling both nuclear and non-nuclear research capability to foreign powers. Legally of course. That post was based in Winfrith in Dorset, but lost its charm in direct relation to the lack of a coherent energy policy in the early 80s and I left making a complete leap to a CEO post in a small specialist national charity working in health and disability. My interest in disability had been sparked in student 'workcamps' with disabled young adults while I was at university (where I read Philosophy Politics and Economics).
My work in this charity (Thrive) and the other two I eventually ran (Carers’ Trust, Weldmar Hospicecare) convinced me that the solutions to many of the health and disability problems in our society are best solved at community level by those communities themselves leaving the institutions for the genuinely complex and technical solutions to extreme cases. It also convinced me that the flows of funds inevitably ran in the opposite direction largely because these insights were not shared by the bigger institutions - the Councils and, most of all, the NHS.
So in 1994 in a parallel career move, I became a Non Executive Director (NED) in the NHS, working in Somerset Partnership (mental health trust), the Strategic Health Authority for the South West and then the one for the whole South of England and then University Hospitals Bristol. In 2017, recently both retired from the CEO job at Weldmar - but still a NED at Bristol - and also widowed, I took a sabbatical, sailing most of the way around the world on the Clipper Round the World Race. (I missed out on the Pacific crossing having broken my arm spectacularly on the Sydney Hobart Race while trimming a recalcitrant spinnaker. If you are a sailor you will recognise a galumphing name drop there). This dramatic disruption did not encourage me to change my life but it did convince me that I had more to give to healthcare and as the Chair position at the Royal United Hospital in Bath was becoming vacant when I returned, I applied for it and here I am.
Having a part-time job 35 miles from my home near Wincanton seemed as good an excuse as any for transforming some of my pension pot into a 'pied-à-terre' in Kingsmead which I now happily occupy during the week. Exploring Bath has been a delight. My late husband was extremely disabled and Bath is not easy for people like him so we had largely avoided it. COVID has of course curtailed some of this exploration and also made my 'part time' and Non Executive job feel far more onerous than anyone could have imagined. As a result my involvement with the Bath Women’s Fund has been more sporadic than I would have liked especially as its aspirations concur so much with my own views of how to make things better. In so many ways, I am looking forward to this changing!