Mersey Care NHS Trust is currently going through a major change process. We are bidding to attain Foundation Trust Equivalent Status (FTe), a new standard of excellence for NHS organisations, particularly
trusts that provide secure mental health services.
If successful, we will receive the green light to work in a similar way to Foundation Hospital Trusts, but will remain under the control of central government. Also, we will be empowered to deliver high quality services to local people who will have greater influence over the health services we provide.
We have had to restructure the organisation; we have appointed a new chair and made significant changes to the way we operate. A tough new financial plan has been created to deliver greater efficiencies and increase productivity.
We recognise these targets will have a major impact on staff and want to ensure that their wellbeing and health are important. To achieve sustainable change, it was crucial to engage all employees so they would respond more positively to the planned changes.
The new leadership roles require people with sophisticated leadership skills
Part of the restructure was the establishment of new clinical business units which are jointly run by a new team of clinicians and managerial staff from within the trust. These units have their own financial and productivity targets and are tasked with reducing absence rates and ensuring employee engagement and well-being are high. The new leadership roles require people with sophisticated leadership skills, commercial know-how and the ability to engage their teams to deliver the new targets.
We appointed Robertson Cooper Limited, a leading business psychology company to help us implement the change process because they offered us a unique way of integrating employee engagement and wellbeing with leadership development.
Kim Crowe
The company used ASSET, its employee engagement and wellbeing survey with all our staff to assess the impact of the changes. In the past, we used an annual employee survey to assess a sample of our workforce. However, ASSET was given to all staff at every level in Mersey Care and it incorporated a focused set of questions to assess the impact of the changes on employee engagement, wellbeing, motivation and commitment. ASSET helped us get a grip on what matters to employees in terms of feeling good about coming to work.
After the ASSET results had been evaluated, Robertson Cooper devised a development centre programme based on an adapted version of the NHS Leadership Qualities Framework (LQF) that made it easier for leaders to apply to wider organisational development.
At the development centres, 51 managers and senior clinicians who were considering applying for the new leadership positions in the clinical business units were put through rigorous assessments to assess their leadership potential and skills required for the new roles.
The tests included psychometric assessments and realistic scenario-based exercises involving professional actors, where candidates role-played the challenges that would typically confront a leader of a clinical business unit. The development centres played an important role in creating the right climate in which to select the best people for the new roles, improve wellbeing and engagement and to educate new leaders on how to address staff priorities and become more effective leaders.
The board saw great value in this approach and 83% of the senior managers and clinicians who completed the evaluation agreed that the content of the development centres met their expectations. We have now appointed new leaders in all of the business units. In addition, the results from the ASSET survey are being used to build action plans with leaders as they settle into new roles over the next 12 months. We have already reduced employee absence rates across the trust and continue to develop our approach to staff wellbeing and engagement.
Our goal is to achieve sustainable change at Mersey Care. In turn, this will enable us to deliver excellent health services to patients in Merseyside – and that, ultimately, is our mission.
Kim Crowe is executive director, Mersey Care Trust
