Dr Brian Tehan Medical Director for Quality & Transformation and Consultant Anaesthetist

About me

Brian is a GenerationQ Fellow and Medical Director for Quality & Transformation and Consultant Anaesthetist at Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCU).

He also leads on patient safety across the health board and works with colleagues to develop clinical and managerial leadership programmes. 

A consultant since 1995, he held a number of senior clinical management roles, taking up his current post at BCU in 2010. He has professional responsibility for secondary care across a district general hospital and a mental health inpatient unit.

Brian graduated in medicine from University College Dublin in 1986 and went on to train as an anaesthetist in Sheffield and Leeds. He has been a consultant anaesthetist since 1995. He has held clinical and medical director positions at Conwy and Denbighshire NHS Trust and North Wales NHS Trust.

He has previously been secretary of the Welsh Intensive Care Society. In 2006, he completed advanced training in medical leadership with the British Association of Medical Managers.

Brian’s key interest is in mortality reduction and leads this for the health board. In synergy with this, he is drawn to a number of patient safety areas. To date these have included processes of mortality review and investigation, medicines safety, rapid response to acute illness, artificial nutrition and patient safety notices.

Brian says that taking part in GenerationQ has definitely helped him to grow and develop as a leader. 'I’m able to step back and take a much broader view of situations than I used to. The programme introduced me to a great many ideas and approaches that I regularly tap into in different situations.'

Learning about appreciative inquiry made a particularly strong impression on Brian. 'It’s something I’d heard about before, but hadn’t tried out myself. It’s now become a valuable tool in my day to day work. In several instances I’ve deliberately gone into an important conversation without a set agenda, to see where a completely open approach will lead – and it’s always produced good results. I think I’ve got a lot better at trying to understand where other people are coming from, reading the room and adjusting my approach accordingly.'

GenerationQ is helping Brian to explore the potential for establishing a quality improvement faculty at BCU. 'At the moment we have a certain amount of quality improvement skills and knowledge within the organisation, and I’m interested in how we can use this as a springboard to develop our organisational capacity for improvement.

'I’d like to reach a point where a quality improvement faculty supports people from across the organisation to identify opportunities for change and then make it happen. And members of the faculty would also be involved in spreading knowledge and skills more widely throughout BCU.'

Still very much an ambition, with recent changes making this more likely, Brian is very keen to understand how others have successfully done this, and to learn from their experience.