As the collaborative developed, the core executive team was established and began working formally on the ambitions, objectives, and governance structure, all of which were underpinned by a guiding principle of enabling trusting relationships and moving to a culture of collaborative working.
The Black Country Provider Collaborative is chaired by Sir David Nicholson and hosted by The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust on behalf of the four organisations. There are approximately 20 people working within it, half of whom are in full time positions. These roles can be broken down as follows:
- one senior responsible officer
- one managing director
- one chief medical officer
- six project managers
- eleven clinical network leads
- three operational leads.
The Black Country Provider collaborative leadership group includes:
- A senior responsible officer (SRO) - Diane Wake. Diane is chief executive of The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust and joined the collaborative as SRO in October 2020. Having previously chaired the cancer board for the system, as well as the elective and diagnostic board, Diane was well placed to take on the SRO role. Diane was keen to ensure that the provider collaborative was clinically focused and clinically led from the outset.
- A chief medical officer - Dr Jonathan Odum. Jonathan is chair of the Black Country integrated care system (ICS) clinical leaders group, a systemwide network covering all aspects of medical, clinical and nursing care, as well as group chief medical officer for Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust and Walsall Healthcare Trust. As the response to Covid-19 eased, his role in coordinating the clinical efforts and his experience working at a wider scale led him naturally to the chief medical officer position for the collaborative.
- A managing director - Sohaib Khalid. Sohaib joined the team as managing director for the collaborative in 2021. Sohaib has been able to focus on building a clear governance structure to enable the clinical improvement programme to begin making improvements to the patient experience and outcomes.
With a team in place, the conditions for a successful dialogue between organisations were reinforced by a supporting governance infrastructure. This was informed by clarifying roles and responsibilities, the expected benefits to the ICS, the patient population and providers and the setting out of principles and intentions.
Evolving Governance
The Black Country Provider Collaborative has kept its governance under review as it has evolved. The leadership team have recently agreed that they need to move from a committee in common structure to a joint provider committee, to strengthen the collaboration between the four providers.
The key drivers for this change are:
- To simplify the process and remove much of the duplication around decision-making which can hinder and delay progress.
- To ensure that executive directors and other key stakeholders have a clear understanding of their role within or in relation to the collaborative.
- To strengthen their ways of working across the organisations in preparation for the expected delegation of functions from the integrated care board (ICB) from 2024.
The collaborative took legal advice ahead of taking this decision and the plan is for the new joint committee structure to be in place from summer 2023.
Bringing staff on the journey
The provider collaborative leadership team have been mindful of the need to dispel any myths around what the future shape of the collaborative might mean for individuals and their roles.
As part of this process of reassurance the collaborative managing director has led a communications plan to explain the journey of the Black Country Provider Collaborative to the collaborative executive and to teams across the individual organisations. This has emphasised that the planned joint provider committee is more a of legal framework than the committee in common but is still a sub-committee of each of the individual provider boards.