In partnership with The King's Fund, we have launched a report on leadership vacancies in the NHS – this has important findings nationally, regionally and locally.

The report presents an analysis of data from a recent NHS Providers survey of leadership vacancies in trusts, and the results of qualitative interviews and a roundtable that The King’s Fund conducted with frontline leaders and national stakeholders.

Our analysis focuses on executive directors within the provider sector. Encouragingly, compared to the last time The King’s Fund conducted a similar analysis in 2014, the average length of tenure for a chief executive has increased from two and a half years to three years. But this is still short and the level of churn in all the executive director posts we looked at remains worrying. The ability to recruit high calibre chief operating officers is of particular concern with growing demands on services.

The data and insights highlighted in this report really matter – high vacancies and turnover have a significant impact on culture, staff engagement and performance and disproportionately affect the most challenged organisations in our system.

See our infographic for more details.