NHS Improvement to establish succession plan for top 200 leaders

The plan is one of the major recommendations of the review of centrally funded leadership and improvement functions – widely known as the Ed Smith review after the NHS England deputy chair who led it.

The review, published this afternoon, also confirms that NHS Improving Quality will be axed, and its functions will be split between NHS England and NHS Improvement.

Meanwhile, strategies for improvement and leadership development, including talent management, will be developed at a national level, and within every local NHS organisation. These will be overseen by two new governing boards.

The review is strongly critical of the existing arrangements for system improvement.

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It says: “The current architecture for improvement is remote, fragmented and unclear. The roles of NHS Improving Quality, academic health science networks, strategic clinical networks and clinical senates are not understood, nor is it clear how these fit with the improvement work undertaken by the NHS Trust Development Authority and Monitor… as a result the current improvement architecture is difficult to access and navigate.”

“The system’s current leadership and management capability and capacity is insufficient to meet the current and future needs of the system. In particular, it is insufficiently system (as opposed to organisationally) orientated… There is wide variation in the extent to which leadership development is connected to and aligned with local priorities.”

It was announced earlier this month that Mr Smith will chair NHS Improvement.

Not all of the review, which was completed in March, will be implemented because some of its recommendations have been overtaken by subsequent announcements by health secretary Jeremy Hunt.

The scope of the succession planning programme is still being defined, although HSJ understands it will focus on the most important leadership positions in provider trusts and clinical commissioning groups, rather than national bodies. These will mainly be chief executive posts, but might also include senior roles such as finance directors in strategically important organisations. With around 450 trusts and CCGs nationally, NHS Improvement will have to identify which leadership positions are the most in need of a clear succession plan.

It is intended that this programme will not be prescriptive, and will not centralise the appointments process. However, John Wilderspin, the national implementation director for the review, said that the process should be more coordinated than the current “ad hoc” system. According to the review, “a number of these roles are at risk of not being filled in the future if the right talent is not identified and developed”.

NHS Improvement is likely to establish a talent pool for senior leaders to support succession planning.

NHS Improving Quality will be scrapped at the end of 2015-16. Its staff will be split as follows:

• NHS Improvement will take over its patient safety team and the capacity and capability building function; and
• NHS England will take over the “thought leadership” team and various programme teams such as its “seven day improvement team”.