Chair of scandal-hit trust stepping down ‘to do more work in the Middle East’

Professor Smith, a former chief executive of Imperial College Healthcare Trust, has been chair of East Kent for the last two and a half years and will step down next spring. The trust says he has reached the end of his term and will not be seeking an extension.

During this time the trust has seen major concerns about care quality, and this month the Care Quality Commission announced it would prosecute over failures to provide safe care of baby Harry Richford and his mother. It will be the first prosecution of an acute trust for breaching the fundamental standards of care.

Harry died a week after his birth at the trust’s Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Hospital in Thanet. His case and that of other babies has led to an independent review of maternity care at the trust, which is ongoing.

The trust also saw a high number of covid deaths over the summer, when HSJ  highlighted it also had a very high proportion of covid cases identified eight or more days into patients’ hospital stay, suggesting that they had acquired it in hospital. It was criticised for poor infection control in a CQC report this month.

In a statement, the trust said Professor Smith had been invited to expand his involvement in a major international health transformation programme in the Middle East. It is not clear when it was agreed that his first term would be for three years.

Professor Smith said: “I believe that chairing this trust board is a very important role that requires total commitment and I can see that next year I will need to devote significantly more time each month on my work in the Middle East. I would not be serving the trust, its staff, its patients or our local communities properly if I could not give this job the total focus it requires.

“Over the past two and a half years we have faced some major challenges. The coronavirus pandemic has been the biggest health challenge of my life time and I believe that here, as elsewhere, the NHS has risen to this challenge with staff commitment and dedication that goes far beyond the call of duty.”

Professor Smith, a gynaecologist by training, was formerly on the board of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children FT and set up the UK’s first academic health science centre while he was at Imperial. In 2011, he became the founding dean of a medical school in Singapore and then dean of Melbourne University.