Mr Leslie Paine MA (Oxon), OBE Formerly House Governor of the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital (1963-1985)

Leslie Paine (or Nicky as he was widely known), who has died aged 92, was, among other things, a wartime pilot who won the Russian Federation’s Ushanov Medal and Arctic Star, a distinguished rugby player, a prolific writer on health services organisation and a highly respected psychiatric hospital administrator. He was hospital administrator and later House Governor to the Joint Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital for more than 20 years. He epitomised a generation of health service managers who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure doctors were left alone to exercise clinical skills and do the best for their patients in the most favourable conditions. When he was first appointed, the Joint Hospital already enjoyed the reputation for the sound treatment of in-patients amid comfortable surroundings. Its training programme for junior psychiatrists was keenly sought after, having been established by Professor Aubrey Lewis and by the Dean, David Davies. Academic resources were, however, limited: this was a time when the Institute of Psychiatry was diminutive and accommodated wholly within the hospital buildings. They included a cramped library and a tiny lecture theatre on the Denmark Hill site. During the same epoch the state of the Maudsley’s research achievements was similarly still quite modest. However, over the next two decades the Maudsley advanced further to become the world leader in the provision of a sophisticated educational programme. The developments were not without difficulties: there were frequent tensions between the needs of patients for continuity of care and the needs of trainees for wide experience and therefore for relatively brief attachments. Tempers flared when consultants feared patients were being short-changed. The complex system was regulated by a committee with input from both the Institute and the Joint Hospital, but the essential requirement for success was a positive attitude of good will and mutual trust. This was guaranteed through the benevolent presence of Leslie Paine who was able to succeed in negotiating between rival interests including the often dogmatic consultant staff. Leslie developed a useful method to elicit the trust of individual clinicians. He assured them that they were the experts in their work and he was merely an administrator whose task was simply to let them get on with the job of patient care without interference. Initially it was the teaching programme that was the linchpin to the Maudsley’s enviable reputation with the research achievements appearing later and developing more gradually. In particular the Institute’s success in raising large research funds from the Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust had to wait till the late 1980s. Prior to that point research depended on the injection of research monies from the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Endowment Fund, a fund made possible as the result of the marriage between COLUMNS