Engaging staff ‘The Leeds Way’

Subsequently describing a momentous first year in post as CEO at the Leeds Trust, he stressed the importance of ‘engaging staff’ in the quest to improve patient services, and highlighted the vital role that estates and facilities personnel play, both in maintaining a clean, safe, and high quality care environment, and supporting their Board and management colleagues in dealing with the media, regulators, and other external organisations, following ‘crisis’ events. He also explained the five key tenets which underpin ‘The Leeds Way’ – a recently implemented approach to optimising patient care, managing staff, and indeed improving every aspect of the way that a large acute NHS Trust operates.

Beginning by thanking all those gathered for ‘making the investment’ to attend the IHEEM show, Greg Markham – who later the same day handed over his Presidential chain to his successor, Chris Northey (HEJ – October 2014) at IHEEM’s 2014 AGM (page 6) – opened the conference by welcoming and thanking all the sponsors, exhibitors, other key organisations, and delegates, for their support in staging an event which he said would provide plenty to talk about at a pivotal time for the UK healthcare sector, given that the show was taking place in the run-up to the 2015 General Election.

Reflecting briefly on some of the major challenges facing the healthcare estates sector, he acknowledged that healthcare estates and healthcare engineering personnel still faced a backdrop of austerity, while being tasked with ‘delivering more with less’. He said: “We have both an ever-increasing workload, and an ageing population with ever more complex needs, but fortunately, it seems, a healthcare budget that has been protected by Government. Indeed the Conservatives recently promised during their Conference in this very building that ‘yes’, there would be additional investment for healthcare.