Dr Dickon Bevington

What does a typical day look like for you?

I help to ensure that one of the core goals of the Cambridge Children's Hospital - to fully integrate physical and mental healthcare, at every level and across every department - is 'sense-checked' against the demands of frontline mental health services, and to think about the staff training and development that will allow this approach to work. Recently, I have been helping to check the design requirements of the building in preparation for the final planning hurdle, the Full Business Case, using my prior experience of working in various inpatient mental health settings.

What inspired you to join the Cambridge Children’s Hospital Project?

I was an anthropologist, philosopher and comparative religionist in my earlier career, training as a medical doctor later in life. I quickly found psychiatry was where I had the most to give and have worked in frontline services for more than thirty years. Along the way I became medical director for a large research, training and development charity in London, from where I co-founded an approach called AMBIT that it is used around the world by multiple professionals and disciplines to collaborate around the complex and multiple needs of the most overburdened youth. It was this fascination in helping people from very different intellectual and practice backgrounds to coordinate themselves around the most vulnerable people that drew me to Cambridge Children's Hospital, with its inspiring vision of making real the saying "there is no health without mental health". Physical and mental health are, of course, two sides of the same coin, and what we are doing at Cambridge Children's Hospital can change the way that future training and practice embraces this truth.

Share one meaningful or interesting part of the project that you’ve contributed to

These past months (Summer 2026), I have been helping to finalise the design of internal environments that are fit for purpose, allowing physical and mental health care experts to do what they do best together. We have done this with the help of our wonderful experts by experience - young people and parents with direct lived experience. They are full of powerful ideas about how their hospital journeys could have been (and will be, we are determined) better!

Describe the Cambridge Children’s Hospital project in three words

• Inspirational
• Bold
• Equitable

What excites you most about the new Cambridge Children’s Hospital?

The chance not just to build a beautiful new 'container' for healthcare work, but to radically change the way that this work is understood, as a PARTNERING of different professionals, parents and young people, all embedded in and enriching the communities and wider regional networks upon which each of us depends.