Stafford Hospital: CMI backs calls for public inquiry
The results of the latest inquiry into the Stafford Hospital crisis reveal a catalogue of management failures at every level and within every aspect of the hospital, its services and its structure. The chief executive of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has responded by backing calls for a full public inquiry in order to bring those directly responsible to account and so that useful lessons can be learned to avert similar catastrophes across the NHS.
CMI is also calling on the NHS to ensure that all its management staff possess adequate professional qualifications and, where appropriate, to put a rigorous programme of professional development in place to ensure any gaps in skills at management level are addressed.
Ruth Spellman, chief executive of the CMI says:
“The latest report into the Stafford Hospital crisis reveal deficiencies and shortcomings within virtually every aspect of the management team and its work, including a culture in which bullying was commonplace and staff were fearful of reprisals if they brought issues to attention. It is evident, too, that an emphasis on meeting targets was prioritised well ahead of considerations about staff wellbeing, performance, and, worst still, patient safety. Additionally, change was constant, poorly managed and inadequately explained, to the point where structural changes took place without any consultation, and at the cost of people’s lives.
“Stafford Hospital is a prime example of what can happen when those responsible for leading an organisation lack the professional skills required to meet the demands of the job in hand. To this end, the health service should now examine the potential for a policy whereby it only employs managers who are professionally qualified, and take steps to qualify its existing workforce. The wider NHS has much to learn from the failings in Staffordshire and needs to take urgent action to ensure that such a scenario never occurs again. That is why, as a matter of urgency, there should now be a full public enquiry.
“Finally, the UK management community as a whole should take heed of what can happen when management and leadership fail sorely to deliver, and see it as a catalyst for change in every sector, particularly where leadership inadequacies have already led to crises. Tough questions must be asked about how we can improve management and leadership standards, not only within the health service, but all industries. The question on everyone’s lips should be: what can we learn from this?”
Ruth Spellman’s comments come against a backdrop of figures showing that just 1 in 5 managers in the UK are professionally qualified. Data from the CMI also shows that 31 per cent of managers feel overloaded with work and 23 per cent claim that the long hours they work adversely affects their ability to make decisions.
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Further information:
Faith Riding, Kindred Agency
Tel: 020 7612 8865
Email: faith.riding@kindredagency.com
NOTES TO EDITORS
The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) is the only chartered professional body in the UK dedicated to promoting the highest standards of management and leadership excellence. CMI is the guardian of the National Occupational Standards for Management and Leadership and sets the standards that others follow
As a membership organisation, CMI has been providing forward-thinking advice and support to individuals and businesses, for more than 50 years, and continues to give managers and leaders, and the organisations they work in, the tools they need to improve their performance and make an impact
As the only organisation to offer qualifications from Level 2 (GCSE) to Level 8 (PhD), CMI is committed to equipping individuals with the skills and knowledge to be exceptional managers and leaders. Qualifications and accreditations such as Chartered Manager, combined with products such as CMI’s Continuous Professional Development scheme and the online support resource, ManagementDirect, support the development of management and leadership excellence across the UK
Through in-depth research and policy surveys of its 86,000 individual and 450 corporate members, CMI maintains its position as the premier authority on key management and leadership issues
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Comments
This seems to be happening a lot though. You have this, you have things like Baby P. The civil service does not seem to be particularly well managed at all.
The requirement for a more professional approach to both Leadership and Management within the NHS is long overdue. My wife worked at a local hospital for 20years before she retired two years ago and during that time she went from loving her job to dreading having to go to work. Bullying was endemic and many managers were more concerned about covering themselves and their personal career prospects than about patient care, much less the welfare of staff.
Unfortunately this is neither new nor isolated as the long history demonstrated at Stafford confirms. Our daughter also trained as a nurse and experienced first hand the inadequacies of managers at a number of hospitals prior to moving to the States in 2004. She observed that there were some extremely willing and dedicated staff working in the hospitals but they were poorly led and lacking insiration and motivation. It seemed that whatever they did was either wrong or ignored - few managers said 'thank you' for a job well done.
It would appear that there is a culture of bullying and 'mamgement by fear' that has developed in the last 10 - 15 years in particular, much of which is down to the lack of training and experience of people who are appointed as 'managers' without any assessment of their managerial capabilities.
I fully support Ruth's call for the NHS to address this critical area and bring the focus back to where it should be - patient care.
My wife, like Eric's above, now dreads going to work because of the constant conflict in giving effective and adequate nursing care and the targets set by the Trust/Government. While there is a need for effective goal setting, the highest priority within the NHS should be patient care and I feel sometimes that the more senior management have lost sight of this.
There seems to be an upper tier of senior managers that are more concerned with "Management Accounting" while frontline staff have no support mechanism in place from their superiors for day to day decisions.
Part of the problem lies with the expectation of certain grades e.g. Sister/Senior Sister to perform management functions as a normal part of their duties without the training or support to do so. This was laid down in the Adjenda for Change and Knowledge and Skills Framework (KSF).
Interestingly, another document was released on March 2nd 2010 from the Prime Ministers Commision regarding the future of Nursing http://cnm.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/front_line_care.pdf and on page 63 it does mention the managerial duty of care by Senior Nurses and Nursing directors but does not say how it is going to be achieved.
There is a NHS graduate Management scheme in place but the entry criteria seems to be the ability to complete complex maths puzzles and not of your ability to motivate and lead employees.
I have a wide network of family and freinds in the NHS and the story is depressingly similar throughout the UK. Someone needs to focus more on soft skills rather than making poor performance look great on a balance sheet or annual report.
As part of any management or leadership role within the NHS, the National Occupational Standards should be adopted as part of their KSF as it provides good practice guidelines that are sorely lacking.
The issues of gross negligence,malpractice and corperate manslaughter continue to stalk the NHS which is still preoccupied with the targets and initatives set by the Departement of Health. The vast savings that could be made by `clipping the wings' of both the DoH and NHS by outside audits on both on the total costing of so-called `blue-sky-thinking' from the DoH and the vast financial wastage caused by the internal insistance of purchasing equiptment/supplies at vastly inflated prices from favoured suppliers (whos abuse the system which is biast in their favour) for no tangelble reasons, would make savings of beween 50-75 %. The NHS budget has doubled to well over 100 billion in less than 5 years, whilest robbing other areas such as `respite for carers' who have been robbed of any form of break from their un-paid devotion to duty, which already saves the Government more than it spends on the NHS each year by year. This is where all the money thats needed for `care for the elderly and others' is being squandered. We DONT need another `cross-party meeting' to talk about `ways in which to financially penalise the electorate' for the centralised mismangement from central government. We don't need more people sleeping in store cupboards, being nursed and sleeping on ward reclining chairs as beds had run-out along with a basic lack of supplies such as linen and soap. We need a CMI task-force to root out the `corperate gangreen' and stop the NHS lumbering from one disater to another, reporting its findings to a Westminster cross-party investgation into the `false accounting' within the NHS.
Countess Heather Ashley.