Here - Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust

Interview with Fiona Edwards, Chief
Executive SABP NHS Foundation Trust
June 2010 By Abigail Crutchlow (supervised by Raja Mukherjee)
Fiona Edwards is the Chief Executive of
Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS
Foundation Trust and I met with her
recently to interview her about some of
the current issues and her views and
opinions on her role and how the Trust
can progress:
Q. Many people working in the Trust
may not know that much about you.
Can you tell me a bit about your
background and interests?
“My background is human resources
professional, originally in industry, before
working for the NHS. I achieved seniority
fairly early on in my career, and initially I
was very focussed on that, and then
thought “what’s next? What does my
career look like?” I was interested in
exposure to an industry that I thought
would be more people based. I became
HR director in a Community Mental
Health and Learning Disability Trust in
Berkshire and after about six years
became very focused in wanting to move
into general management and a Chief
Executive role, largely because I felt my
professional background and the nature
of the services and the work would match
well in terms of what I consider needed to
be sorted in the Health Service, which is
people management. In my spare time I
do a lot of running; physical exercise is
important to me, it is my personal and
switching off time. I am competing in the
London ASICS 10k race”.
Q. We have now been a Foundation
Trust for about two years. What do
you feel has gone well so far?
“I am pleased to have achieved
foundation trust status in a struggling
health and social care economy. Surrey
has never had a good reputation from a
financial management point of view, and
given that one of the main issues for a
foundation trust is competence in
running the organisation and being
focussed, that has been a big
achievement. Key factors in this include a
strong executive and board team working
ethos. We have invested a lot of time at a
senior level concentrating on how we
work as a multidisciplinary team. The
other bit is optimism - rather than
spending all our time focussing on what
is going wrong and what is worrying us.
One example would be when we were
thrown by a negative visit by the Health
Commission where it did expose some
genuine criticisms. You could then go
into immediate disaster scenario,
thinking: “Is this what all our Services are
like?” which is what we did. But what we
then did, to get ourselves into a positive
frame of mind, was to then systematically
look at all the issues, but also why we, as
a board and executive team, were not on
the alert to this. It meant we had a much
more comprehensive view of things,
which some people might think is quite
bureaucratic and audit based, but has
helped me and the board to really focus
on the importance of local team
leadership”.
Q. What are your visions for the
future and can you outline any
particular challenges faced,
particularly running a geographically
large Trust?
“Over the last year we have put a huge
amount of effort into our Staff Survey,
getting a high level of response, and
involving all of our staff. This is to
demonstrate to staff that we really want
to understand where they are at, and
through managing that process via local
managers and leaders it will help me to
understand and manage individuals
better as well as the organisation. With
Interview
Surrey and Borders Online Journal www.sabp.nhs.uk/journal 29