The Barts way with Shane DeGaris

Barts Health is an organisation that delivers care from 5 hospital sites; has 40 operating clinical units; employs around 24 thousand staff and spends around £2.5bn of public money. Each site has its own leadership team, headed up by a site CEO and over all of this is an organisation wide executive team, with shared support services - with Shane as the organisational CEO and accountable officer.The organisational operates with local identity and delivery, supported by the benefits of being part of a larger organisation. It has worked hard on reducing variation; develop hospital site leadership; used clinical networks to drive out variation and all supported by shared support services.Clinical networks work hard to establish how teams can be best in class and support across sites with capacity issues.The Group arrangements to include Barking and Havering hospital saw Shane appointed as the CEO; a shared Chair with Barts Health and the ambition to seek improvement and use some of Barts experience and capacity. Following the departure of the joint chair - separate Chairs were appointed and it was agreed to unravel the Group arrangements. Shane now leads/Chairs a formal partnership of acute providers/collaborative between Barts, Barking &Havering and the Homerton hospital. There had been little intertwining of infrastructure between the two organisations, therefore the unravelling was not difficult.The acute collaboration focuses on three key areas that were important to the three hospitals.Being the group CEO is a privilege; very varied, but important to keep the people/staff experience at the forefront of his role to ensure values, behaviour, inclusion and equity are a core focus. Shane plans to be in a different hospital each day and his key role is to create the environment for leaders to flourish. The balance is to ensure the culture is good, but always with a razor sharp approach on delivery and performance. Shane describes how his style has changed in the Barts health role - felt it would have been difficult to move into the role without multi-site experience (which he got at Bart’s before he was appointed CEO0. He learnt how to work through people and adapt to support change - not direct everything. Discussed succession issues and the opportunity for future CEOS - Shane felt that site CEOs =, under an accountable officer, were a great opportunity for people to learn their trade and become more confident. Matthew Winn, podcast host and an experienced leader in healthcare in the UK.