Acute CEO retiring after major trust turnaround

Dame Alwen Williams today said she will leave the Barts Health Trust group of hospitals after nearly seven years as chief executive.

She took over in 2015 when it had an underlying deficit of £145m and had just been put into quality special measures by the Care Quality Commission, having been rated “inadequate” for four of the regulator’s five inspection domains.

She leaves what will be her last full-time role within the NHS after a 40-year career in the health service and with her trust no longer in special measures, rated “requires improvement” overall and “good” in three of the five CQC domains. It now has a deficit, as of 2019-20, of £63.6m on an annual turnover of £1.7bn.

Last year she told HSJ her focus since joining the trust was on improving quality. The challenges at the trust were so acute she said she had had to “reinvent the operating model of the organisation in a very different way from traditional NHS processes”.

Rather than lengthly consultation, she said, “I literally had to get the unions in a room and I said: ‘If we don’t do something over the summer, before winter, the risk is that the quality of care is going to continue to deteriorate and the financial situation will [too]’”.

Each of the four hospital sites in the trust got its own executive leadership team as it formed a group of hospitals under her overall control.

The trust is the central component of the developing north east London integrated care system and is in the process of closely integrating services with its neighbour Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals Trust.

Both trusts share a chair, former health minister and home secretary Jacqui Smith, who said of Dame Alwen: “Alwen has done a fantastic job in leading a successful turnaround in the fortunes of Barts Health. The team she built has taken one of the country’s biggest acute trusts out of special measures and established an effective group model to deal with the challenges the NHS faces for the future.

“After consulting colleagues, I will make a further announcement as soon as possible about arrangements for recruiting a successor.”

Before joining Barts, Dame Alwen was the London director for the NHS Trust Development Authority – overseeing the NHS trusts across the capital – and her first chief executive job was also in inner east London, as CEO of Tower Hamlets Primary Care Trust. It was known for successfully tackling underperforming GP practices, and developing a model of collaboration across practices to improve diabetes care.    

Dame Alwen was honoured in the New Years honours list in December 2020.

Barts’ deputy chief executive, Shane DeGaris, will continue in that role and lead the trust in the interim while a decision is made about a successor.