Painting a new picture: hearing from Director of Strategy and Sustainability Wayne Bartlett-Syree

Wayne Bartlett Syree   web

This week our exec message comes from new Director of Strategy and Sustainability, Wayne Bartlett-Syree. Six weeks into the new role, Wayne talks about his passion for healthcare, his goals, and that all important ‘strategy’ word…

I’m a born and bred Bedford (try saying that three times!), so I’m a local lad and know our patch reasonably well. I’ve been working in healthcare for a long time, starting out as a nurse on the trauma ward at Bedford South Wing Hospital, where I fell completely in love with healthcare, working with patients and being part of the NHS. I went on to do my full nurse training in Nottingham, and worked in intensive care there for seven years. It might seem strange to have gone from the clinical side of the track to the ‘dark side’ of strategy and management, but after being given some project work to do in ‘service improvement’ on the ward, I never looked back.

I do miss working directly with patients and their relatives, but I’ve come to realise the impact I make now is just different; when you’re dealing with patients, you get to make an individual (but vital) impact on one person at that one point. On the strategy side of things, you get to make a broader impact on a larger number of people – but the results of that impact take a lot longer to be seen.  For me know it’s not about saying ‘what did I do yesterday?’, but ‘what was the effect of what I have done over the last year, and where do we need to be at the end of the next year to continually improve things for our patients and staff?’

A lot of people say to me ‘what is strategy?’, ‘why do we need one?’, whilst at the same time saying they don’t know where the Trust is heading or what it wants us to be doing. In the simplest terms, a strategy is just a document that sets out where an organisation wants to be at some point in the future.  The aim is to help the Trust focus on its key goals or problems and provides a structure of how we should get there. Overall it helps people to prioritise limited resources to achieve the key goals for the trust.  As the new Director of Strategy and Sustainability, it’s my job to help us do that.

So – where does EEAST want to be next year, in three years, or even five? That’s what we now need to work out, and what will essentially be our strategy. The people who have the answers are you, my colleagues, who do the job day to day. You know what needs to change; you just don’t have the time, the space or head room at the moment to do anything about it. So it’s my job to help you find the answers.  The analogy to describe my role? Provide the Trust with the canvas and the materials so that collectively we can paint picture what a good looks like in the future.

It’s about forgetting what’s gone before and setting the goals of what we all want to achieve now, and deciding what ‘good’ looks like. Is it being high-performing? Is it being a great place to work? Is it about being completely patient-centred? In reality it’s probably all of those things, but once we’ve decided that once and for all, everything we do can work towards that one vision. I know that to some of you this kind of talk seems very ‘big picture’, especially when you have to just focus on each shift, or each day. But it’s really important that you’re involved.

We are going to run 12 culture and strategy sessions, where we’ll be looking at the results of the culture survey and some of the challenges we face. Each session will have about 20 people from across all teams and areas, and I hope it will spark some good quality conversation. Details on how you can be involved will be shared on Need to Know soon, so watch this space, but regardless of whether you come to a face-to-face session or not, you’ll have the chance to feed into the strategy.

We are the only ambulance service inspected by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) so far to have got an ‘Outstanding’ care rating – and that’s something that’s inherent to the organisation. You can’t teach care. That rating is just a sign that, as an organisation, we’ve got the deepest and most solid foundations on which to go forward. And I very much look forward to us doing that.

Have a good week,

Wayne

Published 25th August, 2016

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