Working with Finance – Clinician of the Year Award

Clinicians’ primary role is to provide the best possible advice, treatment and care to patients. But they can only do this if the money available to the NHS is used well. Failure to do so results in less care and of lower quality. Money will only be used well in the NHS if clinicians are fully engaged in managing it. A joint statement to this effect was issued in early 2009 by the Audit Commission, the Department of Health, the HFMA, the RCN and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.

This award acknowledges the importance of clinical engagement in financial management and in particular recognises a clinician who has taken financial responsibility for their services, led efficiency or improvement programmes or provided an example for other clinicians by engaging with the financial management agenda.

Further detail on this Award can be found in HFMA’s 2009 Awards brochure.

Winner: Dr Ellen Wilkinson Cornwall Partnership NHS Trust

To be thrown into your first substantive leadership post with no senior colleagues on hand to help is a difficult prospect. Add in the fact that your trust is in turnaround and the only financial experience you have is managing your own personal finances and the odds on success are long.

Cornwall Partnership NHS Trust’s medical director, Dr Ellen Wilkinson, was put in this situation in 2006 and succeeded.

Achievements

Judges were impressed by Dr Wilkinson’s belief that finance, business and IT should not be separated from clinical care. When she was appointed in August 2006, the trust – principal provider of mental health and learning disability services to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly – had a recurrent financial deficit of £1m. She set about engaging clinical colleagues and bringing them together with finance managers to address the deficit, while at the same time improving quality

Dr Wilkinson has worked closely with finance colleagues in the preparation of reference costs, examining activity data and using the information to target efficiency savings. 'It was like being thrown in at the deep end,’ Dr Wilkinson said. ‘But it was a tremendous opportunity to work together with finance colleagues to learn more about what they do. Most of all, it is rewarding to bring people together from different backgrounds to make patient care better.'

Ethna McCarthy, the trust’s director of finance and information, pays tribute to Dr Wilkinson’s drive for ever-higher standards and her willingness to challenge the status quo on budgetary control and financial management. ‘Ellen quite rightly expects a great deal from the finance team and shares her frustrations when systems or processes fall short of her ideal,’ she says. ‘She does not compromise on quality and expects the same from support functions.’

Further detail on the winning entry is available in the HFMA 2009 Awards Supplement.

What the judges said

“She identifies savings and is keen to take on a financial challenge. She also produces easy-to-read finance reports. Her energy and willingness to understand and analyse financial data, together with her credo, ‘Quality first, but quality saves costs’, caught the judges’ attention as they named her Clinician of the Year."

Further detail on the entry requirements, judging criteria and judges for this particular award can be found in the HFMA 2009 Awards Brochure.

Also shortlisted: Dr Steve Allder, Plymouth Hospitals NHS Trust