About the author

Dr D J Brown is the founder of the CAREFUL programme and author of The Meaning of Careful. He is a member of the College of Emergency Medicine in London and practises as an Emergency Physician for half of his working week. The other half he dedicates to improving healthcare leadership in both the UK's National Health Service and the private sector. Although he works primarily with trust and hospitals in the UK, he also works with Care Homes and has relationships with with institutions in the USA, Canada, India and China.

A few years after qualifying, Dr Brown left his job as a doctor in the NHS to develop a career as a implementation consultant, focusing on helping organisations change the way they worked. He learned how spending time and energy creating the right culture can transform the results that an organisation can deliver.

After a few years working outside healthcare he returned to his vocation. He found the NHS still populated by caring, capable and committed people - but also found many of the things he'd been working against in industry: poor leadership, process and systems that didn't work, unbalanced targets and above all, a total lack of understanding of how people are motivated to do their jobs. For most staff, the system really wasn't working.

Soon after that, poor hospital care nearly killed his mother. At that point, he realised the system wasn't working for patients either. Since then he has focused his non-clinical work on creating helathcare institutions that are great places for staff to work and great places for patients to be treated or, in other words, CAREFUL organisations