Daily Insight: Veteran CEO’s parting shots

An acute trust chief executive officer has announced that he is stepping down next year after taking the organisation out of special measures.

Andrew Morgan took over at United Lincolnshire Hospitals back in 2019, by which point the trust had been moving in and out of additional oversight for five years.

During his time at ULHT, Mr Morgan – who previously held a series of leadership roles at organisations that would be described as “challenged” in NHS parlance – was able to begin tackling the county’s long-standing problems on culture, maternity care, and emergency services.

These efforts were reflected in 2022 when the care watchdog said there had been “widespread improvements” and recommending it move out of special measures.

The Care Quality Comission’s chief inspector said a “new approach to leadership had changed the culture of the organisation”.

Speaking to HSJ in 2022, Mr Morgan said having an “open and transparent” relationship with regulators was key to making improvements at ULHT.

However, the CEO said in previous roles he had faced situations “when you thought you were the solution but you became the problem”.

Mr Morgan went on to say that leaders taking on difficult jobs in the NHS should be “supported [and] cherished”, not “pilloried”.

Now or never

The future of community diagnostic centres that were due to open in 2024 is in doubt, following a decision by Steve Barclay not to approve any community diagnostic centres that can’t be delivered this year. 

Several well-placed sources have told HSJ that the health and social care secretary is determined not to sign off any CDCs – designed to speed up cancer treatment – with a proposed opening date of next year, but they say that a 2023 deadline for nearly 30 of the proposed schemes is impossible.

Suppliers of crucial equipment – including expensive and complex MRI and CT scanners – cannot respond in time, they say.

NHS England and local systems are now exploring workarounds, such as temporarily using mobile imaging units while the CDCs are established in attempt to win Mr Barclay’s backing.

A senior figure involved said: “The secretary of state has set a deadline for CDC approvals of December 2023. The only logic people can see is how it fits with the general election cycle, or his modus operandi which is ‘do everything now because I say so’, whether it is practical or not, and this certainly isn’t. Even when everybody’s telling him, ‘that’s not the right way to do it’ or ‘it won’t work’, he [still] won’t listen.”