Heartbeat: New exec sponsor encourages colleagues to speak up and be heard

May 24, 2022

Freedom to Speak Up (FTSU) provides a national framework that NHS trusts use to empower colleagues to raise concerns. It aims to develop open and supportive cultures that encourage staff to share patient care, quality, or safety issues.

Our organisation is diverse – it’s a melting pot of people and experiences. As such, we want colleagues to feel safe to raise concerns regardless of their background or role.

We have Speak Up Guardians in place and several ways people can raise concerns, including via our staff networks, the chaplaincy, union representatives, our executive team, Heartbeat or our non-executive lead, Lesley Writtle.

Support for Freedom to Speak Up has recently been bolstered as Dinah McLannahan, Chief Finance Officer, has taken on being the executive lead for FTSU at SWB. We caught up with her to find out how she is getting to grips with her new role.

“I see my key role as executive lead being oversight of the speak up function in the Trust, supporting our Speak Up Lead and Freedom to Speak Up Guardians in their roles,” Dinah told us. “I have a responsibility to ensure that FTSU is well resourced, that it has the capacity and capability to triangulate information and ensuring there is a regular voice heard at our Board meetings.

“Above all, this role is about holding me, my executive and non-executive colleagues to account for our behaviour in relation to FTSU and our teams and how we handle matters of concern raised to us. These changes will ensure we have the right organisational culture towards speaking up in our Trust.”

Dinah has wasted no time getting plans underway to ensure our FTSU framework is as effective as possible. She explained: “I have begun planning – we took a paper to Public Board in April that sets out our 30, 60 and 100-day actions. This was agreed by the Board, and we are now beginning to implement our plans.

“We have a new FTSU Lead in the Trust, Emma Barton, who is working full time on this. Emma has also agreed to the action plan, and she will be providing regular updates directly to Board. I have met with most of the Freedom to Speak up Guardians for an initial conversation about where we are with FTSU currently from their point of view. I also meet regularly with Lesley Writtle, our Trust Vice-Chair and Non-Executive Lead for Freedom to Speak Up at SWB.”

Dinah added: “FTSU is so important to me. Our job is to provide high-quality patient care. We achieve that, I think, by having psychologically safe environments with happy, productive and engaged colleagues. That is not possible without having the right approach to being able to speak up when things are not right.

“It is fundamental to everything we do. I have practised this philosophy in my team since I joined the Trust. I regularly reinforce to my team the importance of speaking up if something is bothering them, and if we can do something about it, we do.

“If I had one key message, it is to please speak up if you have a concern at work. Ideally this should be to your line manager, but if that isn’t possible there are many ways in which you can raise a concern – please search Speak Up on Connect to find out more. Alternatively, you can contact me at dinah.mclannahan@nhs.net or on 07816 535761.”