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Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 17 September

September 17, 2021

I would like to thank all those colleagues from a wide variety of roles across our Trust, who have congratulated me on my appointment as the substantive CEO of the Trust.  Those messages of congratulation and best wishes have meant a great deal to me and have confirmed that my decision to apply for the role of leading our organisation, was the right one.  As I have said before, the welcoming nature of our Trust, the quality of our clinical staff and leaders and of course, the Midland Met development, make the prospect of leading the Trust an exciting and humbling one.

It is now beholden on me to set my stall out with regard to the direction of travel for the organisation and how we will govern ourselves to achieve our new strategic goals.  To set this out, I will be following the principles of the Sandhurst Military college definition of the responsibilities of a leader – those being that a leader only has two responsibilities – to set strategy and maintain morale.  In public services, I would add a third, that being to provide assurance on progress and being accountable to the public for that.  But hopefully you can see what I mean – keep it simple.  Focus on priorities.

We have a good first opportunity to set out our new thinking on Trust strategy at our annual leadership conference which is coming up on Tuesday next week.  I’m delighted we have decided to hold the conference in person, rather than virtually.  At the conference, we will be seeking our Trust leaders’ views on:

  1. Our emerging new strategy – focused on 1.  People – better recruiting, developing and engaging our staff.  2.  Patients – being good or outstanding in the delivery of the fundamentals of care.  3.  Population – to improve life chances and health outcomes by delivering proactive, better integrated care
  2. Maintaining and improving morale – exploring what the last, hugely difficult and emotional 18 months has meant for colleagues and how our people plan can ensure that health and wellbeing, together with recruitment, retention and engagement/involvement can ensure team SWB can drive our objectives

Whilst we won’t be exploring the drier issue of assurance and governance changes at our leadership conference, we will be pursuing this work in parallel.  Changes will be made to how the executive team and our wider clinical and management leaders make decisions and hold each other to account.  The watchwords for the changes will be simplicity and clarity.