This is the latest in a series of interviews with chief executives, which are available exclusively to HSJ Insight subscribers.
Joanne Chadwick-Bell had big shoes to fill when she took over from David Loughton as chief executive of both Royal Wolverhampton and Walsall Healthcare trusts less than a year ago. Mr Loughton — a controversial leader — was at the helm of RWT for almost 20 years and at WHT for two years, and was the longest-serving CEO in the NHS.
Although Ms Chadwick-Bell will, of course, not be drawn to comment directly on the approach of her predecessor, she is confident in her style of leadership and being “the right chief executive for right now”.
She stresses her style of leadership is “democratic” and says she is “really happy to be challenged”. She believes one of the most important things is that everyone is allowed to have a voice and she wants to foster an environment where “people get to lead themselves”.
“I try to bring the wider executive team into identifying what the solutions are and how we’re going to take that forward,” she says.
From clinician to manager
Ms Chadwick-Bell has an unusual background for a CEO and a huge breadth of experience. She started out as a pharmacy technician in a community pharmacy before taking on leadership roles in the ambulance service and the private sector, moving into the NHS provider sector almost 10 years ago.
She is proud of her origins in pharmacy, where she worked for the best part of 15 years, as she believes it gave her a solid “understanding” of the Eastbourne community in which she worked.
“I learned an awful lot about people,” she says. “Especially in community pharmacy, it’s quite a privilege because you see into people’s lives, because they come to you for everything.”
Her route into management then started with a master’s degree in business administration at the University of Brighton, where she had the opportunity to do waiting list management while on secondment from pharmacy, and then into another programme focused on improvement methodology.
“That skill set has always stayed with me and allowed me to go into head of service improvement,” she reflects.
Not all about hospitals
Adding to her wide range of experience, she then went into the ambulance service, into what would have been Sussex Ambulance Service before it was merged into South East Coast Ambulance Service.
“What a privilege to go into people’s homes and see how they live. It gives you a very different perspective on the life that I grew up with, in many cases. You see people at their most vulnerable. You see all walks of life,” she recalls.
“You care for those elderly patients who are lying on the floor waiting for an ambulance to come. And also you see those patients, for example, in Brighton, who had drug dependency, alcohol dependency, and lived in very different circumstances.
“In terms of forming what you understand the NHS to be about and what it is trying to deliver, it’s not all about hospitals, by any stretch of the imagination.”
She also saw what it was like for people working on their own in a community setting, and also how vulnerable the staff could be at times.
Ms Chadwick-Bell progressed to senior leadership roles in the provider sector, before moving to the independent sector in 2013 to become a regional director for Care UK, responsible for a wider set of services, including the delivery of primary care services, out-of-hours, 111, GP practices, and walk-in and urgent care centres.
This role taught her to “deliver at scale across really wide geographies”. At one stage, she covered Hampshire to Suffolk, with contracts in areas such as Lincolnshire and Milton.
She learned the value of the relationship with commissioners, as at the time, commissioners were her customers.
Her role at Care UK gave her confidence in her ability to innovate and deliver change, and “not get caught up in the governance”.
“Your governance has to be strong,” she acknowledges. “But also [have] that ability to walk around and still just triangulate things by listening to people. You couldn’t just sit in an office. You had to go and talk to people. I think in some ways, it was quite an interesting time to step out of the NHS for three years.”
Back to the beginning
She returned to the NHS in 2016 as chief operating officer at East Sussex Healthcare Trust, an integrated acute and community provider.
She became deputy chief executive in 2019, was appointed acting chief executive in 2020, and in 2021 was substantively appointed to the chief executive role.
“That was a really proud moment, becoming the chief executive of an organisation where I started my career, an organisation where my friends and family lived, where I had my children,” she says.
Compared to East Sussex, she says the West Midlands group model she leads now has many of the same challenges, despite the demographic differences.
“In the West Midlands, you have younger, frail patients… higher acuity needs in younger populations, whereas Eastbourne was an older population.”
With a new role, “you get an opportunity to refresh yourself”. She says: “I feel quite liberated at the moment to just get on with things.”
Ms Chadwick-Bell has hired a managing director for RWT and is seeking someone to fulfil the role at WHT to focus on delivery. The main difference in the group role is that it allows Ms Chadwick-Bell, as group CEO, to focus on strategy and long-term planning, rather than getting too involved in the day-to-day operations.
“I give a clear vision, a clear set of ‘this is what we need to deliver’, but how we deliver that is about us as a team,” she says.
“It’s a collaborative approach and all members of the executive team are leading the organisation.”
