My friend and former boss, Andrew Wall, who has died aged 81, had a distinguished career in NHS management, and was the district administrator for Bath for nearly 20 years. Fearlessly honest, he had the courage to say what he thought, which did not make him popular with everyone. But he always had the best interests of patients at heart.
Born in Hampstead, north London, Andrew was educated at Sibford, a Quaker boarding school in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and always said that the enduring legacy of a Quaker education was the ability to work things out for oneself.
A conscientious objector, he spent his national service as a nursing auxiliary in the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London. He then studied English at Bristol University, graduating in 1961. During the holidays he worked as a hospital porter in Oxford, where his appreciation of the hardworking, lower-paid workers began to grow.
In 1961 he became a national administrative trainee in the NHS at Princess Margaret hospital in Swindon, Wiltshire, where I was a holiday relief porter and where we first met. He then went on to work in Manchester, Plymouth and Doncaster.
His first chief officer post, in 1972, was at the Taunton group of hospitals in Somerset, then, upon reorganisation of the NHS in 1974, he was appointed district administrator for Bath. I trod the same path as him through the national training scheme, and he eventually appointed me as his assistant in Bath, where he and I stayed until the abolition of the Bath district health authority in 1992.
Dealing with the first stirrings of industrial unrest in the NHS in 1978 was a challenge Andrew met unflinchingly, balancing his natural sympathy with low-paid workers against the needs of patients. He also tried to stick within tight budgets by reducing some facilities, a position that brought him up against the might of many consultants.
Between 1981 and 1992 he wrote a weekly column in the Health Service Journal on diverse NHS subjects, ranging from how to cope with a League of Friends fete to topics arising from national politics.
Andrew survived eight reorganisations, but fell at the ninth in 1992, when business methods became the basis of NHS management. His departure was nothing to do with his ability as a manager, and everything to do with his views about how the NHS ought to be run. After early retirement Andrew spent some years as a trainer and commentator on health service management issues.
His personal life became more settled as time went on – he bought a house in the village of Hardington, in Somerset, and his last 10 years were spent with his civil partner, Robert Kiernan, a woodworker, who survives him.
