IHEEM’S NEW PRESIDENT
First female President sets out her goals and ambitions
Last month saw the Institute’s first ever female President officially take office. Alison Ryan, a Chartered Engineer with over 20 years’ engineering experience in healthcare, took over the chain of office from Paul Fenton at the Institute’s 2022 AGM at Healthcare Estates. Before the show, HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, met up with her to discuss her career to date, her involvement with IHEEM, her goals during her two-year term as President, and some of the areas where she believes the Institute can have even greater impact.
Perhaps remarkably – given the Institute’s increasing focus on equality and diversity – Alison Ryan is IHEEM’s first ever female President, a role she told me – when we met up in mid-September at Mott MacDonald’s Leeds offices – she is honoured and excited to be taking up. Starting by discussing her education, early ambitions, and key career milestones – most recently, in March 2021, she joined Mott MacDonald as Deputy National Healthcare Technical MEP Lead after almost 20 years at building services engineering consultancy, DSSR – it was immediately clear that engineering is in her blood. Indeed, one of her main focuses as IHEEM President will be to do all she can to promote engineering as a profession, and healthcare engineering and estate management in particular, to potential entrants. Despite sterling work by bodies such as the Royal Academy of Engineering, Engineering UK, and the professional institutes, including high- profile and successful initiatives such as the annual IET Faraday Challenge – which seeks to uncover budding engineers at schools across the UK (IHEEM was the main ‘theme partner’ for 2021-2022 – HEJ – August 2022), there remains a significant shortage of engineers in the UK.
Early career thoughts Our conversation began, however, with us talking through her education, career progression, and growing professional status – before discussing her aims and ambitions as President. She obtained her secondary education at St Aidan’s Church of England High School in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, where she grew up. She fared impressively, gaining 11 GCSEs, and A Levels in Maths, Physics, Geography and General Studies, plus an AS Level in English Language. “I always had an aptitude for Maths and Science,” she explained. “My late father, Ian Long, had been an electrical engineer, and worked extensively on healthcare schemes. After a spell at the Yorkshire Regional
Alison Ryan answered audience questions as part of the conference’s ‘Engineering’ keynote session, which she chaired at Healthcare Estates 2022 last month.
Health Board, he joined the consulting engineering firm, DSSR, which had just set up an office in Harrogate, and he greatly enjoyed his work. He subsequently encouraged me to follow a similar path, albeit, in my case, with a mechanical, rather than an electrical, engineering bias. I remember him helping me with my Electronics and Design Technology GCSE work, but it wasn’t until I was nearing the end of my BSc Honours degree in Physics in 2001 – Physics being a core subject for engineers – that we really seriously discussed me going into engineering, and the prospects and opportunities there.”
Bias towards clinical roles In her late teens, Alison Ryan didn’t really know what she wanted to do career-wise, although she was confident about where her strengths lay. She explained: “We had a careers advisor, but the general advice seemed to be largely that those pupils performing well academically should go to university. There was little mention of apprenticeships, or indeed any real focus on engineering careers, while if you
discussed healthcare, the emphasis always seemed to be on becoming a doctor or a nurse. My mother, Lesley Long, was a nurse at Bradford Royal Infirmary, and my grandmother, Stella Kemp, Matron of Grassington Hospital, so I have strong family links with healthcare.” On completing her degree in summer
2001, Alison Ryan followed her father into the consulting engineering business when she joined DSSR’s Harrogate office. “After advice from some of my DSSR colleagues,” she explained, “I then embarked on a two- year HNC in Building Services Engineering at Leeds College of Building. This was – in my view – the best course I could have done. I was working full-time as an Assistant Mechanical Engineer at DSSR while studying, and the course modules related exactly to what I was doing at work. I could thus transfer the theoretical knowledge from the course and use it in a much more applied way. There was, for example, an air-conditioning module, which included a focus on psychrometrics – a topic I don’t think my Physics degree course had ever touched on.”
November 2022 Health Estate Journal 35
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