Ian Thomas - Chief Risk Officer

In this episode of the One Health Podcast, Dorian Broomhall, Manager of Culture & Wellbeing, gets to know Ian Thomas, our Chief Risk Officer. 

During our conversation, Ian speaks about his long career in corrections, and how transitioning into management gave him the chance to work at various prisons across the UK and Australia. 

He talks about the crucial role that comradery amongst colleagues plays in helping us look out for each other in demanding work environments. 

Transcript

Dorian Broomhall:

Welcome to the One Health Podcast. This episode was recorded on the land of the palawa people. I acknowledge and pay respect at all Tasmanian Aboriginal people and to the deep history of storytelling. I'm Dorian Broomhall, and I'm the Manager of Cultural and Wellbeing for the Department of Health here in lutruwita, Tasmania. For this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Ian Thomas, our Chief Risk Officer. In our conversation, Ian reflects on many different experiences he has had on a very long and varied career, largely working in correctional services. One of the key points that he talks about is the camaraderie amongst his colleagues and how much of a crucial role that plays in helping them look out for each other to get through such demanding work environment. Throughout his career in the prison service, Ian had the chance to transition into management, which allowed him to work at various prisons across the UK. This journey eventually led him all the way to Tasmania, where he served as the Director of Prisons for nearly eight years before coming to join us at the Department of Health as the Chief Risk Officer. I start every conversation with the same question, so let's get into it. What did you want to be when you were in kindergarten?

Ian Thomas:

It's a great question and people laugh when I give them the answer. I wanted to drive a truck.

Dorian Broomhall:

What sort of truck?

Ian Thomas:

As you know, I'm from the UK originally, like you, so in the UK, trucks are called lorries, especially when I was growing, a kid. So I want it to be what was known as a long-distance lorry driver, to set off from home and be gone for three or four days at a time, sleeping in the cab, and then going on to the next bit and out and about on your own, the world's your oyster sort of thing. I think it was probably playing with the Dinky Toys, as they were called at the time, and I'd see the big ones of these on the road. I would like to drive one of those. I think it gave me a sense of freedom and power almost.

Dorian Broomhall:

And did you ever go on to drive said lorry?

Ian Thomas:

No. I drove a van. So I did become a delivery driver for two years, but it was a small white Escort van. I was selling truck spares, so that was as close as I got to driving a truck.

Dorian Broomhall:

It's not quite the same grandiose thing of driving the big lorry, as you'd say.

Ian Thomas:

No. The biggest thing I've driven is the seven and a half tonne you can drive on a car licence when we moved out.

Dorian Broomhall:

A lot of people have that experience and it's one of the most terrifying things you do as an adult trying to manoeuvre those budget trucks. Where were you in the world when you wanted to drive a lorry?

Ian Thomas:

I was born in Mid Wales, and I lived there till we were 10. And then dad actually went back to school and qualified as a teacher. And the first job he got was across in Lincolnshire, which for us kids back in 1974 was like moving to, a bit like me and my family now moving to Australia. Where are we going, dad? Where's this strange place you're moving us to? But we packed up the six of us and moved to Lincolnshire and went back to school in Lincolnshire. So I was still a primary school kid in them days. Affectionately became known as Taffy because I had this strange accent that nobody else in the classroom had. The family are there to this day. So dad's passed away nearly 30 years ago now. My mum's still there, two sisters there. That's where I met my wife. Her brothers are there. My youngest daughter who came to Australia is now back living in that same town with her husband-to-be. And then I've got a brother in Nottinghamshire as well.

Dorian Broomhall:

Do you sort of have that pull back to Wales or do you sort of think about England as home? Or do you just like the UK sort of more broadly?

Ian Thomas:

When I'm talking to people, it's the UK, but there's still that sort of fiery passion inside that I'm a Welshman. Snap the rock in half, and what does it say? Two years ago I went back on my own to see my mum for her birthday and we took a, myself and my youngest daughter and mum went back to Wales for just for two days. But it was great, just that reconnection. And they say reconnecting with your roots. And for me, they had never really gone. We went back to what was the school I went to school in, which is no longer a school, and the council house that we grew up in. And so that sort of reconnecting with my roots, and I think that will always be my roots no matter what. My mum's still a very fiercely proud Welsh woman. She actually took us on a little tour while we were there. She's 88 now, mum. And she said, "Oh, yeah, take us down the street," which I'd never been in all the time I lived in Wales. And she pointed to this tiny two-up two-down and she said, "That's where I lived in the Second World War." And I'm like 56 and I've just learned that.

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, that's amazing.

Ian Thomas:

Yeah. But yeah, no, I think I'll always be a Welshman at heart, even though I'm now officially an Australian since July.

Dorian Broomhall:

When you realised that you weren't going to be a lorry driver, what was the next step? What did you decide you did want to do?

Ian Thomas:

For a period of time, I thought I was going to follow my father. So my father got a degree in business studies and accounting, and that's what he taught. So I started getting interest in that. I was doing accounts exams at school, amongst other things. But it would be fair to say I wasn't the best pupil. I could be distracted quite easily and I probably did the bare minimum to get through. I think I called myself a student of life. Later in my school years that I realised I needed to knuckle down and try and do something. And by that time, I'd got a weekend job at the local garage pumping the petrol when you still had the pump attendants. And I was a teenage lad as well, so I was discovering cars, et cetera, and that got me into motor vehicles. So I left school with a handful of qualifications but not nearly enough to go on and do higher education. And didn't really know what I was going to do with myself, but the garage offered me a job opportunity. So I worked there for 18 months, booking the cars in for service, MOT, that kind of stuff.

From there, got a couple of other jobs within the motor trade. I worked for a company similar to Supercheap Auto or Repco for about 12 months. And then worked for another company that did similar but doing the delivery and sales, which was great for a lad in his early 20s. I loved cars and I could work my way around a car. But again, I had no formal qualifications and my other three siblings had all left home. My sisters had got married and my brother was off training to be a nurse. And I was just kicking around home and my father was trying anything and everything to get me a career. And he went to London on business one day with the accounting examination board that he worked with and came home with an application form for the prison service. He literally walked past the front door of Cleland House, which is the headquarters for prisons in the UK.

Said, "Here, give that a go." I think I was 21 and whatever at the time, and I just filled it in. I thought I'll just send him off just to keep him quiet. This was pre-email days, so you had to go to the post office. And 18 months later, I was doing my first day at the prison service. They sort of wrote back and said, "Oh, we'd like to come for an interview, we'd like to come for a test." And I'm like, "Oh, this is getting serious now. I might actually be a prison officer." So complete accident that I ended up in prisons.

Dorian Broomhall:

I think what's most fascinating about that as you tell the story is that you then went on to work in prisons for 30-something years right across the world, right? Where was that first prison job?

Ian Thomas:

I joined and did my initial training at Lincoln Prison. So the model in the UK at the time was that you started at what they called your local prison, so it was the nearest one in distance from your home address, and you went there for three weeks. So every day for three weeks I travelled to Lincoln and we sort of got a bit of an induction into what prison life was like and did some fitness, some testing. It was like going back to school really in many ways. A couple of funny little stories around it. So back in the day in 1986 when you joined the British Prison Service, you had to sign the Official Secrets Act. So I still have the piece of paper at home showing I've signed the Official Secrets Act.

Dorian Broomhall:

Amazing.

Ian Thomas:

So it felt very serious for a 22-year-old lad who from the country is thinking, "Jesus, am I really up to this?" And then you went to the training school, which was a residential-based school for nine weeks in Central England. You were asked to submit where you'd like to be posted to. You got your posting a bit like the forces. But your postings were based on where you came from, where the vacancies were most needed, your marital status, age, dependence, et cetera. And the fact that I was young, fit, and technically single, we were engaged to be married, meant I was going to London, it was just which prison in London was getting me, because that's where the vacancies were. And they had a model in London then, in the UK prisons, that the London prisons paid what they call London weighting. So it was a top-up on top of your salary because London was much more expensive to live than everyone else.

So that was probably one of the few spinoffs was you get paid more than anyone else. So yeah, I went to London, I got posted to Brixton, which was the busiest prison in the UK at the time. Was there for five and a half years, but had a great time. We had a quarter, so it was rented accommodation with a prison, which was great. So it was relatively cheap to live. My wife worked for a legal firm in Croydon. And Brixton Prison built in 1832, built for 400, it had 1,200 in it when I was there.

Dorian Broomhall:

Brixton Prison in the late '80s, that would've just been, I mean it would've just been business as usual for you then because you wouldn't have known any different. But we think about the pressures that we reckon we face today.

Ian Thomas:

In hindsight, for me it was an incredibly strong grounding because as I've gone through prisons around the world and gone through the sort of career ladder to the last role I had until recent here, you don't realise at the time, but in hindsight to be able to look back at it and think, well, yeah, I can remember experiencing something like this then, and this is what we did then, and it seemed to be okay. And often what worked then can still work now. We had net three men in a cell built for one, no internal sanitation, so literally slopping out every night. We'd have rooms like this with 10 mattresses on the floor and that's where we'd put them at night because we'd simply run out of cells and we'll work it out in the morning. Not unusual on a Friday night to have 200 new prisoners coming into Brixton Prison. You could be there till one in the morning locating them and then back at six to do your next shift because we didn't have rosters in the way we know now.

Dorian Broomhall:

Of course.

Ian Thomas:

Them days, it was all predominantly overtime based. So things like fatigue policies and work health and safety were not nearly as sophisticated as they are now.

Dorian Broomhall:

As you reflect on that time of your life, what did you do to look after yourself?

Ian Thomas:

I would do, if I could get the overtime and it wasn't hard to get it, I would do a 14-hour day and I'd do that for 12 days straight. And then on the 14th day, I jumped on the train and went up to Lincolnshire to see my fiancee, wife as she's now. But she says to me now in hindsight, she said, "You were useless till Saturday teatime because you'd come home, have a couple of beers and a curry, and pass out, and that would be it." After having survived on beer and chips and five hours' sleep. The meals were available, but they weren't healthy options. You could get a breakfast for a quid, it was a fried cooked breakfast. That was the only option, so take it or leave it. There was no cereal or fruit or that kind of stuff. And the same as the meals in the canteen, subsidised but not what we would now call a balanced or a healthy diet. No access to gyms or anything like that. No private health or health opportunity.

I think the way we looked after ourselves, it was the camaraderie. Guys would do a 14-hour shift and then go to the club because every prison had a club, and have three or four beers, have a chat about how the day went, sort out what went wrong and what we're going to do tomorrow, and then go home, have a few hours sleep, and come back and do it again. In fact, there was a study released in the late '80s just before I left Brixton when the average life expectancy of a prison officer was 18 months post-retirement.

Dorian Broomhall:

Wow. Yeah, that's terrifying.

Ian Thomas:

Because we were doing 90-hour weeks.

Dorian Broomhall:

Yeah, of course. Doesn't leave a lot of time for considering anything else. But it was a way of survival I suppose. So what happened when you left Brixton? Where'd you go next?

Ian Thomas:

My wife had just given birth to our first daughter, Rhiannon, and we wanted to move back to Lincolnshire to be near her family. And a new prison was being built about an hour from Lincolnshire called Whitemoor. So I applied to move there and was successful and got a position there. And I was at Whitemoor for seven years. And then whilst I was at Whitemoor, I got promoted to what they called a senior officer. So that got me on the promotion ladder and gave me a bit of an appetite for, oh, there's more to this than just being a prison officer, and started getting some exposure to being able to influence and make some decisions. Got more exposure to, I guess, managing cohorts of prisoners and groups of prisoners, groups of staff, and started working out that I think I might be quite good at this. And I worked with some really great people and leaders, got some really good support, and was encouraged to continue that journey.

And then I worked through a number of prisons in the UK. So I went from Whitemoor to a little prison down the A1 called Littlehey, became what they called a principal officer. And then I got into the governor grades. So in the UK they had governor grades one to five, one being running prisons, five being running a department. So I got through the selection process for that and moved around three or four different prisons, mainly across the East Midlands including Gartree. So another famous prison where they had the first helicopter escape from a prison in the UK. And then I ended up back at Lincoln as the deputy governor. So I went full circle in 2008, so I was there for a couple of years. And the governor was ill, so I covered the governor's role for a little while, and then moved on to cover another vacancy short term. And then I won my own position as governor at Ashwell, which was an old World War II RAF base that was converted into an open or category C prison as we used to call it in the UK. So I managed that for two and a half years.

Another fun fact about me and my prison journey is that I was on a short break in Poland with my wife and 13-year-old daughter. My daughter was turning a teenager and we said, "What would you like to do?" And she had a school friend who'd gone back to live in Poland, come and go and visit Laura. So we went to Gdansk in Poland, which was fascinating. And on the last night, the Polish family introduced me to Polish vodka. So I might have drunk one or two too many.

Dorian Broomhall:

Which was polite to do.

Ian Thomas:

Which was the only polite thing to do, exactly.

Dorian Broomhall:

Correct.

Ian Thomas:

Hospitality and everything. So the next morning I'm in the bathroom getting ready to fly back to the UK, probably not feeling a hundred percent if I'm honest. And my wife's watching Sky News and she says, "Ian, there's a riot. Oh, it's yours." So I come out of the bathroom half shaved looking at pictures of my prison on fire on Sky News in the UK. So that was the longest two-hour flight back I've ever had. We got back and my work phone didn't work abroad because it was a work phone. So as I landed in the UK, it was just-

Dorian Broomhall:

Chaos.

Ian Thomas:

Chaos. Again it's just message upon message. But I had a phone call from my boss, and I think going back to what you were talking about earlier about Ian's very calm, he and his wife, I worked for him and his wife and they were two of the calmest, most measured people. This guy was an ex lieutenant colonel in the army, very softly spoken Scotsman. And he rang me and he said, "Hello, Ian. It's Danny here." He said, "I assume you've seen what happened. Welcome back." He said, "I trust you're going into the prison in the morning. I'll see you there." He said, "And don't forget, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." I actually went into the prison that night as soon as I got home, and I think I got about three hours sleep. And it was Easter, so I was there most of Easter.

But Danny was great. Easter Sunday, he turned up, we walked around the prison, walked through the water, and what was left of the jail. We'd lost 400 of 600 beds. But he was one of those people I think that I was lucky enough to work for. And I think, like I was saying earlier, when you meet good leaders, I think if you're able to draw bits out of them, think I like the way they do that, I'll see if I can do that in my own way and my own style. But he just gave you that confidence to be yourself and be vulnerable, but at the same time know that he's got your back. And his wife was similar as well. I worked for his wife prior to working for him there. And I went on to work for them both again. And then I left Ashwell, so that was the Easter, I left Ashwell in the October to go back to Lincoln as governor. So I went full circle. So I started at Lincoln in 1986, and then I went back there as governor in 2009, and I was at Lincoln until 2012 when we came to Australia.

Dorian Broomhall:

And what prompted the great move Down Under?

Ian Thomas:

There was a piece of work that was going on led by the new conservative government in the UK around trying to rationalise the cost of the public sector. And part of that included looking at how prisons operated. And ultimately that led to a significant round of closures of smaller, older prisons, and then either building new to replace them or putting accommodation into newer prisons, so economies of scale, efficiencies, et cetera. In that five-year period, I think they closed something like 21 prisons, and in the last a hundred years we'd closed one. So there was a few people feeling vulnerable and thinking what's coming. And I had a conversation with somebody who'd gone to work for the private sector and he said, "Look, it's the same but different. It's just more scrutiny and more focus on the dollar, et cetera, because it's private."

And then probably about a week later, we'd just landed in Tenerife, we'd gone away for a family holiday, and my phone was ringing to say the G4S, who run Port Phillip Prison in Melbourne where I ended up, would like to talk to you, but it's in Australia, not the UK. And I'm like, "Oh, okay." So we sort of had a breakfast meeting in Tenerife and thought, what should we do? Long story short, I had a phone call with them. I did a sort of telephone interview with them, had a long chat with the recruitment firm. And then as a family, we were like, "Well, do we, don't we?" Two of us were very keen, one was reasonably keen, and one wasn't so sure. But it was with a, well, if we don't go, we could regret it because you never know until, unless you try it. Worst case scenario, if we go and we don't like it, we come back.

But I think I saw it as well as an opportunity for the kids as much as anything else. They would live and spend most of their life in Australia. And the standard of living and the opportunities I think was greater for them, it still is, than it was in the UK. You never know exactly what will happen. My 16-year-old, or she was then, was all she wanted to come to Australia and have a big house with the pool. She's now 28 and back in the UK and about to get married. My 21-year-old didn't really want to come. She's now 33 living in her own house in Kingston, is a supervisor in Corrections here, and it's just been the making of her. And my wife who wasn't sure, but now loves Tasmania, loves her job, got a really group of friends. I think the only thing we miss is family. But Tasmania's our home and I see it staying as our home.

Dorian Broomhall:

I had no idea that it was actually prisons that brought you here too.

Ian Thomas:

Yes.

Dorian Broomhall:

And then you've worked in Tasmania for seven, eight years?

Ian Thomas:

It'll be eight years at Christmas, yes. I was director for seven and a half years, Director of Prisons.

Dorian Broomhall:

Wow. Your first job since you were 21 that's not in prisons. That must be quite a profound almost identity shift. I know you're still within the public service and it sounds like you spent most of your working life in the public sector except your stint in Port Phillip. What's it like to come and work in a different industry or a different sector within that?

Ian Thomas:

I must admit, I was a bit scared. And a couple of people said to me, "It's quite a brave thing to do at your time of life, not that you're old and decrepit and ancient. But you're a career prisons man. That's what you've done all your life. Why would you do this now?" But the more I sort of examined it myself and spoke to other people, the more it just seemed to resonate with me as an opportunity that I guess a bit like when we decided to move to Australia, but on a smaller scale, an opportunity I'm not sure I want to pass up. New role within health. A lot of the elements of it resonated with me and what I've done for a living for as long as I can remember. Something that resonated with me as well, and I've learnt this myself in my career journey and said it to other people, that you might not think it, but you're often at your best when you're least comfortable, when you're tested, you're outside your comfort zone.

And if I'm honest, I was in my comfort zone in prisons, not being blase, but that's what I've done. I know it. It doesn't make you think outside the box. It's very structured the way you need to think for the prisons to function. So it was, I guess, my sort of competitive streak and the opportunity to challenge and test myself again pulled me into that space, and test myself and see if I can deliver effectively in a different environment with the skills I've got, but also the opportunity to work and contribute in a different environment, but that still has a lot of similarities in many ways to prisons. If you think about hospitals and prisons as institutions, most of the people that are there don't want to be there, and we're there to provide care to them for the time they're there. We just do it in different ways. So there was some similarities for me in the model.

I don't regret the move. It's only six weeks. I think for the first couple of weeks it was like anybody probably, "Oh, have I done the right thing here and should have stayed where I was?" But the more I get into it, the more I'm convinced it's the right move for me and hopefully it's the right move for Health. I think it's just an opportunity I didn't see coming, but I'm glad it came and I'm glad I didn't pass it by.

Dorian Broomhall:

In your role now as the Chief Risk Officer for Health leading a new branch of the organisation, how do you describe the function of the branch?

Ian Thomas:

It's a good question because I do think outwardly we do need to land and communicate what the role's about. I think people have got their own views, but to me it's about, it's creating a role and then a team to support that role that can help the agency really understand what our risks are, how we best manage those risks, and whether we can manage them to the point of removing them, reducing them, mitigating them. So creating the structure, the tools, the systems within our business that clearly identifies what our risks are, and that's clear to whether it's the secretary or right down to staff on the ground floor and how that links to the roles that we all play. What are the tools we have in place to allow us to deliver our core business effectively whilst managing those risks? And then how do you measure that we are providing the service that we committed to provide as the Department of Health, but we're doing it in a safe, structured, and consistent way?

Government, again, a value for money, patients are getting the service they want and the level of quality they want, staff are able to operate in a safe, secure, and consistent environment. And then looking for ways where we can continue to improve in all of those key elements. And again, in some ways, for me, it's not dissimilar to going back to prisons. It's about a safe and secure environment, safe environment for staff to work in, safe and secure environment for patients to live in and be treated in. It's putting the pieces together or in that jigsaw puzzle that everybody understands what that looks like. So if you were to say, well, what are the key risks for the Department of Health or this part of Health and how do they all interlink? And then how do we recognise, identify those risks, agree what our strategies are to mitigate them? Because you can't always remove some of them and nor should you. But equally, how are we measuring them? How are we capturing the information around that?

Because we will be swamped with data and figures and stats. It's really being able to draw out from that what's the important stuff that we measure, because that will tell us whether we're achieving what our key objectives should be, as against what might be nice to know but isn't going to strategically impact or shouldn't strategically impact the business. Some of the work for me and my team as we get our structure and organisational space correct, is to be able to facilitate a lot of that for the executive and the individual parts of the organisation so they can focus on business as usual. So I think ours is about raising the awareness around risk, making risk part of our core business, but in a user-friendly, comforting way, not a scary way, having a really consistent, clear, and concise message and process around the way we identify and look after risk. So I think less is more in some ways, really strip it back and get a really clear understanding and agreement of what risk is about, what does it look like in all our areas, building upwards from there.

Dorian Broomhall:

My last question for you relates to this is what's your relationship with risk?

Ian Thomas:

Well, I think given the job I've done, I've kind of lived with risk all my working life really, certainly for that best part of the last 40 years. It's certainly fashioned me in the way I am, the way I come across, I suppose, the way I conduct myself. And I think it's probably in my early days, it was a somewhat risk averse, that, well, the way that we prevent this happening is to stop doing that and stop doing this and that almost a punitive approach to managing risk. In hindsight and as I've matured as a person, as a manager and a leader, it's the wrong way to do it because you're actually just exacerbating and creating a bigger risk. I enjoy working in this space. It doesn't stress me out overly because I understand that risk is all around us and it always will be.

It's understanding that the risk is there and then how do we manage it? How do we address it? And in steps, if it's an emergency management incident, well, what is the situation as we know it now? Well, let's do that based on what we know. And then we might wait for 15 minutes, 30 minutes until the people that are on site have got a better understanding of what's occurring. And then they'll give us an update, and that might change what we do to support them, managing it, or it might just reinforce it as well as doing X, Y, and Z.

Risk is an evolving thing around us each and every day, whether it's simply there from getting the car and driving to work, you never quite know but you know there's an element of risk, through to managing emergency incidents in our hospitals and across the state or in the business setting. And again, that can be anything from the conditions that people are working in to the hours that people are working to the ability to recruit and retrain, train staff. They're all risks. It's understanding what the risk is, what are our mitigation strategies short, medium, and long term. I don't think we should be frightened to risk. Done well, I think it makes for a really healthy, productive, effective environment for us to work in and live in. But it's important we understand it.

Dorian Broomhall:

This is a great starting point for us to start thinking about it perhaps a little bit differently. So Ian, thanks so much for the conversation and joining us.

Ian Thomas:

You're welcome.

Dorian Broomhall:

It's been great.

Ian Thomas:

Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity.

Dorian Broomhall:

Thanks to Ian Thomas, our Chief Risk Officer, for taking the time to speak with us and to you for listening. I hope you found something in our conversation that you can take away into your own life. Join us in our next episode where I speak with Peter Boyles, the current Acting Director of the Office of the Secretary.