Morecambe Bay Hospitals Trust under fire: Boss refuses to quit but admits ‘life’s very uncomfortable’ (From The Westmorland Gazette)
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Morecambe Bay Hospitals Trust under fire: Boss refuses to quit but admits ‘life’s very uncomfortable’
10:30am Thursday 24th November 2011 in Lancaster news
DEFIANT: Health trust boss Tony Halsall
HOSPITALS trust boss Tony Halsall yesterday refused to step down despite admitting his job had become ‘very uncomfortable’.
The beleaguered chief executive called a crisis meeting with consultants yesterday, which was still going on into the evening.
In an exclusive interview with The Westmorland Gazette before that meeting he accepted staff and patients were angry with the state of the organisation, which is struggling under criticism from health watchdog the Care Quality Commission and inside critics.
However, Mr Halsall said he was determined to keep the board of directors in place to sort out the trust’s problems.
He said: “I’ve got patients and staff who are angry because we’ve set high standards and of course people will be upset when we miss them.
“When things are going wrong we all take it personally.
"The midwives in our trust - especially those at Furness General Hospital - have taken it especially personally at the moment.
“I’ve been working in the health service for 30 years and I feel equally upset when things go wrong.”
Mr Halsall said he was concentrating his efforts on future plans for the trust and improvements to the five sites it operates.
These are FGH in Barrow, Kendal’s Westmorland General Hospital, Royal Lancaster Infirmary, Morecambe’s Queen Victoria Hospital, and Ulverston Community Health Centre.
He said: “There may be people who are angry but I still have to make my main focus on putting things right and making sure we change our system so problems don’t reoccur.
“Because of outpatient appointment problems we’ve got a back log of work but our consultants are working hard to clear them.
“We need clear targets and deadlines. The trust has brought in external staff to work alongside our clinical teams and we want to embrace a huge programme of change.”
In response to comments from an anonymous consultant who criticised the board in last week’s The Westmorland Gazette, Mr Halsall defended colleagues who he said worked hard to listen to staff concerns.
He said: “It’s extremely difficult to accept the culture here is wrong, but going forward if people feel frustrated then we have to take that on board as a criticism.
“We have people spread over five different sites. To keep them feeling like we’re really listening to them is really challenging.
“We have to consider an easy way to allow people to talk anonymously and we have been training staff to use systems where they can do this and communicate feedback and any problems.”
Mr Halsall said the trust had faced pressures from central government changes and cutbacks, but said it took full responsibility for its own local failings.
“It’s been an extremely difficult time for health boards nationally. But we wouldn’t use these stresses to excuse the issues we’ve got locally.”
He said: “The public expect us to say we’re sorry, to show what we’re going to do about this - but they don’t want to see us walk away.
“In my view it would be unhelpful for senior people to walk out at a time when we have to be completely focused.
“I could take myself out of this dispute and go and do something else - something easier - but that’s not what I want.
“I love my job. At the moment, it’s very uncomfortable but I won’t walk away. No one is going to be resigning.”
Comments(10)
Vorlon
says...
6:15pm Sat 26 Nov 11
It's always "fun" to kick the management - but a lot of these probelms stem from a culture that predates Mr Halsall and the current team and that weren't addressed at the time of the merger.
It also lets far too many of the Health Care Professionals off the hook. They are the ones running the services day to day, they are the ones treating patients day to day, they are the ones paid considerable amounts for their professional expertise. Did none of them notice what they were doing or what was happening in front of them? How many of them actually spoke out, or contacted their professional bodies?
And when the Trust Managment did challenge them - how many took refuge in "we've always done it this way" and refused to change their practices or even consider delivering services differently.
Tony Halsall wasn't on the FGH Maternity Unit 24/7 - a lot of well paid professionals were.
Yes the CE has to carry the can, but it isn't unreasonable for him to expect that qualified professional staff should be working to best practice without needing him standing over their shoulder every minute.
Not every professional attacking the Management is doing it for honourable reasons - quite a number are doing it because they are being held to account for "we've always done it this way" and because the Management is insisting on things being done differently in the interests of patients - not the people providing the care.
gadgetgadget
says...
6:31pm Sat 26 Nov 11
Quite simply they didn't, they sat on serious reports such as the damning ones at FGH for over a year (Tony Halsall had one in 2010 but it wasn't discussed at board level until 2011 and AFTER outside involvement).
It's high time for change - whether that be at CE level or below him. It's the blatent arrogance of the board that is really annoying - they don't seemingly want to take responsibility for their own failures - they just want to close the barn door after the horse has bolted.
They've been more interested in pretty spreadsheets, tick boxes and fancy reports rather than getting patient care right. The attitudes personally described to me by members of staff within the trust are damning of various levels of management. Regardless of whether a director or other executive is on the FGH maternity ward at all times or not the problems at UHMBT go a lot deeper than the sad instances at FGH. Ultimately the directors and other members of management are responsible for the actions/inactions of their staff - one of the issues highlighted in the CQC report was inadequate management of FGH maternity.
Personally I think your last paragraph is very disingenuous of the level of problems in UHMBT and very ignorant of the real levels of concern/annoyance amongst lower levels of staff.
I would suggest you read pixie55's comments on this link and I can personally vouch for the accuracy of that type of attitude of management :-
http://www.thewestmo
rlandgazette.co.uk/n
ews/9382894.Morecamb
e_Bay_Hospitals_Trus
t_under_fire__Staff_
are_frightened_to_sp
eak_out__claims_GP/
As for replacing people who "know" what they are doing - that is precisely the reason why people are wanting change : they've had the chance to prove they've known what they were doing and have failed.
The evidence is stacked up against them and that's not because "kicking management is fun" it's simple logic.
Once public trust in the local health service management is lost as it seems to be in this case then it's time for them to seriously consider their positions - especially the man at the top who in the past has publically stated "the buck stops here" - it's about time they adopted the stance they've shown towards their staff "put up or shut up" !!
gadgetgadget
says...
6:32pm Sat 26 Nov 11
gadgetgadget
says...
6:33pm Sat 26 Nov 11
Vorlon
says...
6:57pm Sat 26 Nov 11
There was a lot more going wrong than just bad management.
If front-line staff hadn't been falling down on the job there wouldn't have been a situation for the Trust to "badly manage" in the first place.
There well be a case for wholsale changes at the top - but if so they need to be done in a sensible manner that doesn't allow everybody else to "tick a box" and declare the issue sorted with healthcare professionals breathing a sigh of relief and going back to the "bad old ways" until the next time.
gadgetgadget
says...
7:12pm Sat 26 Nov 11
I agree the issue goes deeper than just the board but at the end of the day they are the ones that are ultimately responsible. If they haven't taken the health professionals in your scenario to task then that already demonstrates their failures as adequate management. Please read the fourth paragraph in my first post in this thread.
Management are expected to PREVENT problems too as well as CURE them - if they are indeed telling staff as has been reported to stay quiet or not listen to concerns about the changes they are being expected to implement then closing their ears is not responsible management. Quite simply neither management nor staff are ALWAYS right but there needs to be flexibility on both parts - however management can't just expect staff just to put in place procedures that can endanger patients without expecting some fall-out from it.
It appears that we are now at the fall-out stage because staff haven't had the management support they needed whether that be at line-manager level or executive level.
Frankly, I don't care who goes but there does need to be radical change in management attitudes not just privately to staff but also publically. This stance of "no-one is going to resign" is frankly incredulous and does more damage to the Trust's reputation because of the arrogance to the problems that it demonstrates.
WilliamT
says...
2:20pm Wed 30 Nov 11
A more important observation is the expectation of those who reach these senior management positions in the NHS that they will forever after be treated as an aristocracy, no matter how badly they do- and it would be difficult to do any worse than Mid-Staffs. and UHMB. Unfortunately, these Louis XVIs have so far had their expectations realised through the servile attitude of the serfs and the 'we chaps must look after each other' winks of the regulators and DoH. Yeates, the Halsall of Mid-Staffs., was kept in his job for over a year after the Healthcare Commission investigation began. His pals in the board voted him a £400,000 payoff, and his pension pot swelled to £1 million (I don't know how much was added at the expense of Mid-Staffs., but he was only 51 when he was pensioned off). The reason that Monitor, the SHA board etc. say nothing about this is that they hope for similar perks themselves. Even the apparently competent Mid-Staffs. Inquiry treated Yeates and his Chairman with kid gloves. Yeates was allowed to plead suicidal thoughts as an excuse for not being subjected to cross-examination at either of the two Francis Inquiries- he only submitted a bunch of excuses in a statement, but was well enough to go on ski-ing holidays with his pals. One of these is another member of an NHS Trust board. These people certainly stick together.
WilliamT
says...
2:21pm Wed 30 Nov 11
A more important observation is the expectation of those who reach these senior management positions in the NHS that they will forever after be treated as an aristocracy, no matter how badly they do- and it would be difficult to do any worse than Mid-Staffs. and UHMB. Unfortunately, these Louis XVIs have so far had their expectations realised through the servile attitude of the serfs and the 'we chaps must look after each other' winks of the regulators and DoH. Yeates, the Halsall of Mid-Staffs., was kept in his job for over a year after the Healthcare Commission investigation began. His pals in the board voted him a £400,000 payoff, and his pension pot swelled to £1 million (I don't know how much was added at the expense of Mid-Staffs., but he was only 51 when he was pensioned off). The reason that Monitor, the SHA board etc. say nothing about this is that they hope for similar perks themselves. Even the apparently competent Mid-Staffs. Inquiry treated Yeates and his Chairman with kid gloves. Yeates was allowed to plead suicidal thoughts as an excuse for not being subjected to cross-examination at either of the two Francis Inquiries- he only submitted a bunch of excuses in a statement, but was well enough to go on ski-ing holidays with his pals. One of these is another member of an NHS Trust board. These people certainly stick together.
Skeptical
says...
8:35am Fri 2 Dec 11
gadgetgadget says...
11:27am Thu 24 Nov 11
"No one is going to be resigning." - how does that reconcile with the reports of the Director of Operations Steven Vaughan having resigned and serving his notice ?
This report also demonstates how out of touch Mr Halsall actually is with public opinion and I can only draw parallels with Sepp Blatter of FIFA and his stance of "I'm not going to resign".
Mr Halsall needs to realize that management responsibility is to put things right BEFORE they happen not AFTER lives have been put at risk or indeed in the case of FGH maternity unit actually lost.
Sorry Mr Halsall, but the time has come for you to take personal responsibility for the catalogue of failures and realize that you've had plenty of chances to put matters right, failed and it's time to move on and let a fresh set of eyes and ideas look at the problems.
Although I don't expect certain other posters to agree (!) ;)