We launched our first collective leadership forum on 1 May which brought together our 40 or so most senior clinical, professional and managerial leaders from across our corporate and operational teams.
The aim of this forum is to bring people together to share information about our Trust and Greater Manchester as a whole in order to shape our future strategy and collectively tackle problems.
From my perspective, it was a really positive event. I was able to feedback on the headlines from the recently completed well-led review and talk about our priorities going into 2018/19. We also took a look at a draft of a revised Trust Quality Strategy which we are currently refreshing and took on board a lot of feedback about how to frame this in a way that could more easily engage staff.
I am sure these events are going to be helpful in sharing ideas, shaping our future, and creating a stronger sense of shared leadership. We will be meeting every 6-8 weeks with the next meeting scheduled towards the end of June. I would expect people attending these to be sharing key information that is discussed there with their teams, so please flag up with your managers if this isn’t happening.
Following this collective leadership event, we also held the second of our business planning events (the first one being in November) on 16 May. This was a much larger event, with over 100 attendees. I am sorry I wasn’t able to make this, but the feedback I have received so far is that this was a really valuable session.
We focused the session on the development of our culture and values and one of the themes that seems to have emerged was that our values do not fully resonate with staff. We need to do more work to understand why and if this translates across frontline staff?
So, I’d really appreciate your views on this and would encourage you to attend our culture conversation event at Hyde Town Hall on 14 June if you can or to complete the cultural audit that has been sent out recently. Please see the intranet for further details.
All of your views and feedback gathered will be really valuable in helping us build a clear picture of the current culture and how we want it to change. I am very keen that by early summer we have a clear vision and plan for addressing the improvements necessary and can start to really motor on them.
In previous blogs, I have mentioned the clinical presence visits I have been keen to set up. I am pleased to say we now have a programme agreed, thanks to Jackie Stewart who has worked on this. On the first Wednesday of every month, all EDs will be going on all day visits to clinical services – we will be expanding this to corporate services in due course, but I hope that getting out and about will improve our visibility.
The feedback and key themes from these clinical presence visits, alongside feedback from the existing non-Executive Director and governor visits, will all feed into the new Trust Management Board I am setting up, which meets for the first time at the end of June, and then onto Trust Board. This should really help strengthen the line of sight between our front line services and the Board, and hopefully ensure the Board develops a much stronger sense of the reality of working in this organisation and what we can do to support staff, and through them people who use our services, more effectively.
Finally, I would like to end by saying thank you to Jackie Stewart, who this week returns to her role as Managing Director, Mental Health and Specialist Services. Jackie has had a huge impact in her interim role as Executive Director of Nursing and Healthcare Professionals and under her leadership we have made a lot of progress in areas such as safe staffing and mixed sex accommodation. I have enjoyed working with her very much and she leaves very big shoes to fill. But I know Clare Parker, who joins us as Executive Director of Nursing, Healthcare Professionals and Quality Governance, will rise to this challenge and you will no doubt be seeing more of Clare over the next few weeks as she settles into the role and gets out and about meeting people.
Claire Molloy
Chief Executive
