Lifetime achievement award for Oxford academic
08 Nov 07
Professor Bleddyn Davies, Professorial Fellow at the Oxford University Institute of Ageing, is to receive the 2007 International Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Public Health Association. Professor Davies is being honoured with the award at a ceremony at the British Embassy in Washington DC on 7 November.
Professor Davies’ work focuses on the equity, efficiency and reform of community care: better targeting and improved efficiency in the delivery of local authority services; the development of care management; and the funding and reform of long-term care in other countries.
Professor Davies is also Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics and the University of Kent, and Honorary Professor of Social Policy Research at the University Manchester. He has authored or co-authored many books on community care, one of his most recent being Equity and Efficiency Policy: Needs, Service Productivities, Efficiencies and their Implications, written with José Fernandez. Current work includes revising a book based on the same collection, Fair and Efficient Targeting in Community Care. A third has been the development of care management, the focus on which he introduced to the UK through a set of experiments, five books and numerous papers written from the1970s.
Until the late 1970s, most of his two dozen authored books and his other publications had been focused on the development of a theme, which during the late sixties caught the imagination of senior politicians in the Wilson administration from 1964, a ‘theory of territorial justice’, which developed methods of measuring variations in the need-generating circumstances of local authorities.
He was the founding editor of Policy and Politics, and the first international editor of an American journal, Journal of Ageing and Social Policy. He is Chair of the Editorial Board of Social Policy and Administration, board member of several other American and British journals, and consultant on social care and education policy to the EU, UN, OECD, and various government agencies around the world.
He has presented scientific papers about his work at the last 15 APHA Annual Meetings, and his interpretations of the lessons of American experience for British policy development have raised interest in US experience.
Professor Davies was awarded an OBE for his services to social science and social policy, and he is an Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America.
He lectured in economics in the University of Wales and in social policy at the London School of Economics before founding the PSSRU (Personal Social Service Research Unit) in 1974.