Life After DPIR - Ms Lyndsay Mountford
Alumni 1972,
Summary
After graduating I spent two years teaching English as a second language in a boys’ secondary school in up-country Sierra Leone. This was hugely enjoyable and rewarding in its own right, but was also invaluable experience for taking up a fast-stream civil service post with what is now the Department for International Development. Since then all my career has been spent in public policy research and analysis.
I was with DFID for six years, working on UK aid programmes in places as diverse as Pakistan, Gibraltar, the Middle East and St Helena! I also did an MSc in Economics as a means of making the relatively unusual move of transferring from the administrative civil service to the Government Economic Service. This eventually took me into HM Treasury and then the Department of Health/NHS. These were challenging and innovative times which saw, for example, the introduction of private supply mechanisms into the public sector, the development of more formal public sector accounting and performance management mechanisms, as well as the first major post-creation re-organisation of the NHS. I was also working with the DH/NHS when the "internal market" was introduced in the early 1990s.
A family move to Luxembourg in 1997 necessitated my departure from the home civil service, but opened up new horizons on the European front. Initially I joined the European Investment Bank, which had just been given a new lending-for-health mandate, and then worked for the research division of the European Parliament on an evaluation of EU health policy, before doing a three-year contract with the Public Health Directorate of the European Commission. This was a real highlight of my career, having the opportunity to work with health professionals from many different disciplines and from all member states, on pressing public health issues such as comparative cancer survival rates in the EU, anti-microbial resistance and EU-level information systems on health indicators. It was also a period of intense activity by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg as to whether and to what extent the European Treaties gave patients rights to access health care across member states' boundaries.
Since returning to the UK, I have been running a small management consultancy company in Oxfordshire. Although public sector policy has inevitably become more specialised over the years, use of evidence and assessment of value-for-money remain prime contenders for the generalised application of micro-economic principles. A recent assignment, for example, was to devise a core set of performance indicators for the government's humanitarian programmes. Very different to this was a paper I wrote on incorporating water into green accounting which was tabled at the Rio+20 climate change conference. Sometimes my work is nearer to home, such as developing an overarching skills strategy for Oxfordshire, as part of its Local Economic Assessment. Sometimes it has taken me into the more political world of Think Tanks. For me, PPE has proved to be a passport to an extraordinarily varied and immensely satisfying set of working experiences.
