Born in the USSR

For more than 30 years, starting in the late 1980s, a little known overseas development initiative unfolded, involving dozens of health sector management and reform projects all around the world. This initiative began under the auspices of Nicare, the international agency of the Northern Ireland health service, and subsequently transferred to the Healthcare Research and Development Group at Ulster University. The projects have ranged from reform of the highly-centralised health services of the Former Soviet Union to total management of the health services of St Helena and Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. It is not the aim of this book to document or describe all of this activity; rather it is to give an insight into the everyday experiences of the people involved in managing a number of the projects and to do so in an entertaining way. The story cannot be told without including a certain amount of technical detail about the projects and what they were trying to achieve but the emphasis is very much on the unusual and amusing things that happened along the way.