Becoming an NHS statutory Body

Dr Sam Hullah, Chief Clinical Officer

Well the 1^st of April came and went and North Hampshire CCG came into being as a statutory NHS body.  The first working day was Tuesday the 2^nd and the team assembled for our first ever briefing.  As Accountable Officer it was my job to rally the troops. Organisational culture is very topical in the NHS right now and so I felt it was important to set the tone for how I wanted our CCG to work.

There is no substitute for hard work and this has characterised the organisation over the last year.  We are on a mission to improve the health and wellbeing of our patient population and hard work will be needed if we are to be successful.  We will also need self belief, and in addition, to quote a NHS buzzword, resilience.  Setbacks and disappointments are inevitable but we shall remain positive and look to turn disappointments into opportunities.

A good team spirit has built up over the last twelve months; we need to build on that and maintain high levels of trust and mutual support.  And finally we need to keep our CCG as a great place to work.  We have done many interviews over the last few months and it is pleasantly surprising how many candidates have commented on how the style of our CCG is one of the things that attracted them to the job.

So hard work, self belief, resilience and team spirit will be the characteristics of our CCG.

In that spirit we set about our first week, helped at long last by the addition of some new team members.  And it was very much business as usual but with the added excitement of knowing that now we were “doing it for real”.

Nobody at our CCG is under any illusions about the magnitude of task we face in bringing about whole system reform with the intentions of not only improving patient care but achieving that within the financial resources available to us.  Our locality has been plagued for decades with an unfair allocation of NHS money, so at the same time as we work on many clinical pathways it is my firm intention to challenge, at the highest levels, the funding formula which sees our patients get almost the lowest per head funding of any CCG in the country.

On a brighter note we are very much looking forward to moving to our new premises in Chineham Business Park, on June 13th 2013.  We have been made very welcome at Old Basing Surgery and have got used to boxing and coxing for space but we really have outgrown the space and need to move on, despite the sentimental attachment we have built up over the last 18 months.

There is much to do but I now have three days a week in which I can lead our CCG forward.  I am, and shall always be, enormously grateful to my partners at Crown Heights for allowing me to take up this once-in-a-few lifetime opportunity; the first weeks is over but the challenge has just begun!