NHS boss Simon Stevens criticises lack of diversity in management

The new chief executive of the NHS, Simon Stevens. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

The NHS’s new boss has criticised the lamentable lack of managers from black and ethnic minority backgrounds concerned in working hospitals which, he warned, meant they are not reflecting the communities they serve.

Simon Stevens, who began last month as chief executive of NHS England, explained he is so concerned that he is building a prepare to tackle the service’s inaction over the lack of diversity in its leadership, which he claimed was holding the NHS back.

Regardless of pledging a decade ago to tackle the stark imbalance the NHS’s record was bad and worsening, Stevens stated in a speech at the King’s Fund wellness thinktank on the want for cultural adjust and robust leadership.

“It can not be right that 10 years soon after the launch of the NHS race equality program, although 41% of NHS personnel in London are from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, similar in proportion to the Londoners they serve, only 8% of believe in board directors are, with two-fifths of London trust boards getting no BME directors at all.

“Related patterns apply elsewhere, and have truly been going backwards”, Stevens additional.

The chronic lack of non-white faces in senior positions meant the NHS was missing out, he added. “Yet diversity in leadership is related with much more patient-centred care, greater innovation, higher personnel morale, and entry to a wider talent pool”, he informed an audience of about 250 NHS leaders.

He himself had benefited in his career from getting had three black bosses and a woman as his line manager, even though they have been all when he was operating outdoors of the NHS, stated Stevens. The 47-yr-old worked as an NHS manager before getting to be a particular adviser to Labour overall health secretaries Frank Dobson and Alan Milburn in the early years of Tony Blair’s government and then with Blair in Downing Street. He has spent the last decade considering that quitting Amount 10 for a senior publish with UnitedHealth, the American personal overall health group.

Sir David Nicholson, whom Stevens replaced on one April, lately recognized the lack of black and ethnic minority bosses across the NHS as one particular of the failings of his eight years in the task.

Stevens has asked an equality and diversity group inside NHS England to come up with concepts to tackle the shortage by the time it up coming meets on 29 July.

In the speech Stevens also hinted for the 2nd time in his number of public appearances so far that he opposes the idea, extensively supported by health policymakers, that specialist health-related and surgical providers ought to be heavily centralised, calling into query the viability of smaller hospitals.

“We want to give careful bodyweight to communities’ own values and preferences for access versus specialisation”, he said, in a coded warning that the push to centralise risked alienating local people.

The turnaround in the fortunes of Hinchingbrooke hospital in Cambridgeshire, which for two many years has been run by the personal healthcare company Circle, showed that smaller district standard hospitals could have a sustainable future, he additional.

NHS boss Simon Stevens criticises lack of diversity in management