Who is Really Learning
Really Learning was founded and developed by Valerie Iles

Valerie works with a number of other independent consultants, depending on the size and nature of the project. She particularly enjoys opportunities to work with Julia Vaughan Smith of Anaptys, Verity Kemp of Health Planning, Steven Cranfield of Creative Collaborations and Gordon Best of Gordon Best Associates.

Valerie is an independent academic consultant working in the field of health management. She teaches, researches and writes about issues at the clinical/managerial interface, and works with a number of universities and client organisations as well as with individuals and teams. She has a particular interest in action learning as a  development process and  works with many different forms of participative reflection.

For nine years she was the director of the Health Management Group at City University, designing and directing three masters degree programmes, including a novel M.Phil in Health Management which integrated taught and research elements, and the flagship Masters Degree in Health Management. She has also been vice chair of a large NHS Trust and of an inner city Health Action Zone.

She is currently director of the National Leadership Programme of The Royal College of General Practitioners, Honorary Senior Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and an Associate Member of the OD Partnerships Network.

Her publications include the books:Really Managing Health Care, (1997 and 2006); Developing Change Management Skills. (2004); Managing Change in the NHS, a review of the evidence (2001). The last two of these receive over 10,000 hits a month on the SDO website. To order or download these please click here.

Valerie is particularly interested in the marriage of classical management approaches with insights from other fields of study and explores these through topic based learning sets. To download resources resulting from some of these click here.