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Just over a quarter of Care Quality Commission staff believe the executive team’s values and behaviours match those of the organisation, its latest staff survey suggests.

The Our People Survey, shared with HSJ, ran during January and February 2024. The 27 per cent score for staff believing the values and behaviours of executive leaders, including the chief executive and executive team, were consistent with the organisation’s values is a sharp drop from 55 per cent in 2021, the last time the main survey was run. 

There was, however, a fairly small increase in staff who said they recommended the CQC as a “good place to work” compared with the most recent pulse survey in May 2023, with results rising from 40 per cent to 43 per cent. 

CEO Ian Trenholm told HSJ it was clear some colleagues – especially those working in areas which have undergone the most change – were feeling “unhappy and frustrated”.

Politics and the waiting list 

The number of 78-week breaches on the NHS waiting list has risen for the sixth month in a row, while the 65-week breach cohort and overall list size have dropped.

The drop in the overall waiting list will provide ministers with something tangible to at least try to argue better times lie ahead as they head into an election campaign.

But this will likely be drowned out by those who point out this latest data merely confirmed what even the PM admitted last month: that the government missed its target to have the waiting list falling from the 7.2 million it stood at when Rishi Sunak made his big pledge. This latest data shows, as of January, the list stood at 7.58 million.

But the real concern for NHS leaders is the lack of grip on long waiters. The original target, to virtually eliminate 78-week waiters by last March, was missed. Then it was hoped, internally at least, that this cohort could be contained at under 10,000 this winter. But the figure rose for the sixth month in a row to just more than14,000.

NHSE has already conceded it will miss its target to virtually eliminate 65-week waiters by March but addressing the 78-week waiter problem will certainly be taking up considerable bandwidth over the coming months.  

Also on hsj.co.uk today

It has been announced that Saurabh Bhandari, an executive director for the New Hospital Programme, is leaving his role. The announcement comes shortly after programme chief Natalie Forrest revealed her departure. Meanwhile, HSJ has learned an Australian tech firm backed by one of China’s richest people is set to win more than half of the contracts to deploy AI diagnosis tools across several NHS trusts. And, in this month’s Mental Health Matters, Annabelle Collins takes a closer look at this year’s NHS staff survey performance for mental health trusts.