Professor Bleddyn Davies, founding director of PSSRU, was recently awarded the American Public Health Association Gerontological Health Section’s International Lifetime Achievement Award 2007. He was presented with this award on 5 November in Washington. The event was attended by Brian Ferrar, First Secretary Science & Innovation, British Embassy, Washington DC.

Bleddyn’s work has focused on equity, efficiency and community care reform. Particular themes running through many years of work include targeting, service productivities, financing mechanisms, projections of future needs and costs, and care management. Indeed, Bleddyn introduced care management to the UK through a series of experiments, books and papers during the 1970s and 1980s. The policy lessons deduced by Bleddyn from the Kent Community Care Project drew on early American models, and he transformed and adapted them so that they became the ‘cornerstone’ of the policy reforms outlined in the UK government’s 1989 White Paper. He has also been the author of books on the theory of territorial justice, social and economic consequences of gambling, the mitigation of child poverty, and the economics of higher education.

Bleddyn lectured in economics in the University of Wales and in social policy at the LSE before establishing the PSSRU in 1974 at the University of Kent. The aim was to study equity and efficiency in community and long-term care. After retiring as Director of PSSRU in 2003, he became Emeritus Professor at both Kent and LSE, and Professorial Fellow at the Oxford University Institute of Ageing. He was awarded an OBE for his services to social science and social policy, he is an Academician of the Academy of the Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America.

In 2002 a one-day conference was held at the LSE in his honour, and papers from this event were later published in a Festschrift volume of essays by scholars, policy makers and managers.

The APHA award is thoroughly deserved and we are all delighted for him.

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