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Helping find talent for NHS boards
Thursday May 08th 2008. Posted: 08:00
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Jim Pringle says the initiative has resulted in a better-quality list of people than that of any headhunter
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BT is pioneering a unique and innovative public/private partnership to encourage some of the country’s top managers to lend their talents to the NHS.
The partnership is the brainchild of Anne Watts, chairman of the Appointments Commission, which is responsible for recruiting and appointing non-executives to all NHS trusts in England and Wales, and Caroline Waters, BT Group director of people and policies. Caroline needed a senior commercial director who had experience of dealing with major companies and an understanding of the public sector to head the project. It led to the appointment of BT Retail director Jim Pringle to identify senior managers within BT and in other leading companies who would be prepared to become non-executive directors on the boards of NHS trusts. NHS trusts are large businesses in their own right, often with thousands of employees and turnovers in the hundreds of millions of pounds. Finding people with the right financial and commercial skills and experiences to serve as non-executive directors on their boards is a challenge. Traditionally these posts have tended to be filled by retired executives - predominantly men over the age of 50. A key element of the project is to recruit more women and more people from black and minority ethnic groups to trust boards. Anne said: “To encourage more diversity on boards we need to attract a cohort of younger people, and the obvious place to look is the current labour force.” The pilot project began last July and has already proved highly successful. The original aim was to sign up an additional four companies but so far, in addition to BT, 16 companies have joined the project. They include household names like Microsoft, the BBC, HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland. More than 130 candidates have been put forward and nine people, most of them women, have already been appointed and are serving on boards. Among them are five managers from BT. Jim said: “The trusts benefit from the skills and experience of UK plc’s top talent. The employers get more rounded managers gaining board-level experience. And the individuals are able to give something back to their local community. “When you start talking to companies you realise that senior management talent pools get a lot of training but they don’t get the kind of hands-on development, especially at board level, that being a non-executive with an NHS trust offers. We now have a better-qualified, better-quality list of people than that held by any headhunter.” Anne said: "BT has always been at the leading edge of employment opportunity and people development and so we were delighted when BT offered to help us set up this pilot project. Jim's contribution has made a tremendous difference to the success of the project so far." Allison Seidlar, head of industry liaison at BT Wholesale, has been appointed non-executive director of Hillingdon Primary Care Trust. In common with a lot of senior women in business, Allison reached a point where the corporate environment was no longer fully meeting her personal values. “I wanted to feel I was making a difference, to give something back to society,” she said. She was considering opportunities in the environment and corporate social responsibility areas, possibly by volunteering for a local charity, when a BT colleague told her about the opportunities for non-executives in the NHS. “It would never have occurred to me to get involved with the NHS but the more I read up on it, the more interested I became,” she said. Penny McCulloch, head of the regulatory trading unit in BT Group finance, has been appointed non-executive director and chairman of the audit committee at Dartford & Gravesham NHS Trust. She said: “Like most people, my view of the NHS was shaped by my experiences as a patient. It seemed highly inefficient and never structured around the needs of the patient. Being on the other side of the fence makes you see things very differently. Now I understand some of the pressures the NHS is under. “In a large company like BT, and especially in a finance role, you can sometimes feel very remote from the actual end user. But at the hospital trust we’re dealing with issues directly affecting patients. “It’s fascinating to see the workings of a completely different sector, the different constraints it has to operate under and the number of things it does differently to private business. I’m learning things that I can bring back and apply at BT while offering the trust experience from my work at BT.” Anyone from BT interested in applying to become a non-executive director should contact Jim on 0870 8510345.
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