Medway MP raises concerns over health trust chief executive sharing arrangement

KentOnline / KMTV

Naushabah Khan, MP for Gillingham and Rainham, has raised concerns over a recent decision to appoint the current head of Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust to lead neighbouring Medway NHS Foundation Trust on an interim basis.

Transcript

00:00So I was made aware of the interim agreement last week that was going to take place at

00:04Medway Maritime where there'll be a shared chief executive between Medway Maritime and

00:08also Darroch Valley. I think my initial concerns are that while I understand there's lots of

00:14reasons why that might be something that the Trust wants to take forward, there's lots of cases

00:19across the country where that works really, really well and there are joint leadership

00:23programs in place and sort of joint leadership models in place in lots of areas, including the

00:29NHS. So it's not so much that it's something that cannot work, but I just have some immediate

00:35concerns, particularly given some of the big challenges that we face at Medway Maritime.

00:40You may have seen recently there was a inspection report that came through which looked at the A&E

00:48department. Now obviously that report followed an inspection which took place in February last

00:52year, so a lot of changes have been put in place since then. But one of the key things that did

00:57come out of that report was there was a sense that there was a culture within the organisation

01:01where people didn't feel that they could raise concerns for leadership and that's something that

01:05I think really does need to be addressed and I think that's something that really needs to start

01:09with the leadership of the organisation and I appreciate lots has been done since then to make

01:14those changes already, so progress is already happening, but I would be really keen to see how

01:20a model where we've got a shared chief executive works, what that means for Medway Maritime,

01:26what that means for some of the challenges that were highlighted within that report on the A&E

01:30department, and also what that means for the culture of the organisation which perhaps needs

01:36a bit of a review as well. So it's just a few of those concerns that I wanted to raise.

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