27.08.14
New Safety Board at Health Education England
Source: Dr Umesh Prabhu
I am so pleased to read HEE forming a Safety Board. I hope this won't be a Board made up of all white members. Roger Kline has clearly written an excellent article on Snowy White Peaks. Not having a Diverse Board has a huge impact on patient safety and staff wellbeing.
One has to look at whistleblowers’ plight to understand the impact of poor culture and poor leaders on patient safety and staff wellbeing. HEE itself doesn't have a good track record for having diversity on the Board, with hardly any BME at the top of HEE Board.
I am MD of an acute trust, but this comment is made only as an individual who is from a BME background and rarely sees any BME in NHS senior leadership position.
In the North-West HEE, there is no-one BME at the top, and that too when 18% of the NHS workforce is BME and 40% of doctors are BME! Since I wrote to them I have been assured that this will be looked in to soon.
Happy staff = Happy patients. Sadly, BME staff are 3 times more unhappy in our NHS, and the time is right for NHS leaders to look at the reasons and do something urgently. One of the main reasons is subconscious bias of many so-called leaders, who do not realise the impact of their own bias on BME staff and failure to see many BME leaders at the top of the NHS. CQC, Monitor, NHS England, NHS Confederation, NHS Employers: none of these organisations have any BME at the top.
There is a clear association between patient safety and staff wellbeing, and the performance of the Board on the diversity of the Board. I sincerely hope HEE will look at this; nothing is more important than patient safety and staff wellbeing. Even Simon Stevens has acknowledged this and promised that he will rectify this anomaly.
Re: HEE launches new board on safety