People:
Penny Dash, MBA '94
When Prime Minister Tony Blair announced a major overhaul of the National
Health Service in Britain last year, the person behind the scenes in
charge of NHS strategy was Dr. Penny Dash, MBA ’94. The NHS, with a
£50-billion budget and employing more than one million people, is by
any standard an enormous undertaking.
“Absolutely fascinating,” Dash says of her role at the NHS. “I have
an impact on the development of the crucial strategies that will guide
the NHS moving forward.” In a speech Dash wrote for Blair outlining
the NHS agenda, she said the government must address the role genetics
will play in disease prevention, guide the development of a collaborative
relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the biotech industry,
and define a greater benefit plan for the NHS.
Dash was a physician in England in the late 1980s when she began thinking
of a career in business to complement her medical training. She had
studied at Cambridge University, followed by internships and residencies
at University College and Middlesex Hospitals. As an internal medicine
physician, she noticed variations in practice patterns among her colleagues.
This sparked her interest in the management side of health care practice.
Dash applied to Stanford Business School and also to Harvard and was
accepted at both. She chose Stanford, partly because of Business School
professor Alain Enthoven’s work with the U.K. government on health care
issues, but also because of the School’s emphasis on teamwork.
Although she had originally planned to return to the NHS, after graduating
Dash traveled the world working for the Boston Consulting Group. She
says she enjoyed the work so much that she ended up staying for five
and one-half years, until October 1999, when she was aggressively recruited
to head strategy and planning for the NHS.
Dash is currently working on making the system more customer focused,
developing the information technology systems to enable the NHS to collect
and analyze patient care data, and looking at how the infusion of resources
will affect the long term. All that experience with teamwork has paid
off, because now Dash has a team of one million to work with.
—DONNA WRIGHT
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