Chief Executive’s Message – Friday 26 November

November 26, 2021

What is “public service?”

I took this from the free dictionary on-line.  Other dictionaries are available….

“public service n.
1. Employment within a governmental system, especially within the civil service.
2. A service performed for the benefit of the public, especially by a not for profit organisation.
3. The business of supplying an essential commodity, such as water or electricity, or a service, such as communications or transportation, to the public”

I agreed with Ruth, our Director of Communications, that I would write about what it means to me to have spent an entire working life in public service.  This column will also provide the raw material for my Heartbeat column this month.  The reason why we both agreed this focus is because public servants are having a difficult, often torrid time at present.  Whatever your role in public service, be it nurse, police officer, paramedic, social worker, civil servant or senior manager, we are all faced by similar challenges and a more difficult backdrop to our work than we did as recently as five or ten years ago.  11 years of real terms funding cuts in government departments have led to a deterioration in most of the services we offer.  Self-induced workforce crises compound this problem, for example the mass exodus of the invaluable workforce in adult social care.  Public expectations continue to rise and these expectations cannot often be met.  Public dissatisfaction is leading to an abhorrent rise in violence and aggression towards public servants, the very same people who were applauded as essential workers during the first wave of the pandemic, are now vilified.

So why do we, colleagues at Sandwell & West Birmingham NHS Trust, continue to be public servants?  I do hope that most of you joined the service for the same reasons as me and that you will continue to work in public servants for the same reasons.  What are those reasons?  To explain that, I will need to tell you a brief story:

When I left University in the early 1990’s, graduates like me, with non-vocational qualifications (2nd class degree from Dundee University in Politics and Geography), often took to the “milk round” of interviews to join the graduate management training schemes of a whole variety of companies.  I elected to put myself through this because I was spending my post-University time spinning waltzer cars at a fairgrounds and drinking too much.  I needed to find a purpose.

One of the interviews I had was with Marks & Spencers.  The interview was barely 20 minutes in, when the interview chair said, and I quote: “we are going to stop the interview now, Mr Beeken”.  I asked why.  He said “because you and I both know, that you don’t want to work for this company do you?”.  I paused and then agreed with him.  I had realised, subconsciously at that point, that I did not want to spend the rest of my life, selling things that people didn’t need, to help other people than me, make money.  I went on to throw everything I had at the NHS management training scheme application process.  I got on the scheme, starting my first job at Darlington Memorial Hospital in County Durham.  That year was a good vintage.  The trainees I joined the NHS with that year include my predecessor at SWBH, Toby; Richard Kirby, CEO of Birmingham Community Trust and Suzie Bailey, Director of OD at the Kings Fund.   I’ve never looked back and never wanted to do anything else.

I remain committed to the values and ideals of the NHS and committed to strong public services to support the most disadvantaged in society.  I remain firmly of the belief that my main job as Chief Executive, is to create the working conditions for my colleagues that will enable them to release more of their time to care for the most disadvantaged and unwell people in our communities.  We all should also be bound together by the unshakeable belief that we have to protect the quality and resilience of the services we provide, because our family, friends and descendants, will need those services.  If we don’t continue as public servants, then who?