External contributor / Katherine Archer

Katherine's current role is head of financial performance at Oxford University Hospitals. In that role, Katherine works on delivering trust wide improvements to the financial position through development and implementation of business cases, managing the financial performance team and the corporate division financial management team and managing the COVID spend, along with a number of other things. Katherine has good planning and analysis skills, and is an effective communicator to both finance and non finance colleagues.

She grew up in South London and studied history and politics at the University of Sheffield. Katherine started in NHS finance on the graduate scheme more than 15 years ago working in primary care and hospitals in Derbyshire and since then has worked in South Yorkshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire across a number of hospitals and providers. Up until her current role, Katherine had worked in finance business partnering roles with nearly every clinical and corporate service, which gives her a good understanding of the challenges faced across the clinical teams and for finance colleagues trying to deliver a good service under difficult financial pressures, which is relevant whatever your role in finance.

In Katherine's personal life, she juggled work with having two children, whilst trying to keep a focus on wellbeing, eating good food, spending time with friends and family and fitness. 

She has always been interested in training and development, supporting graduate trainees and training on wider finance and non finance aspects of the NHS for herself and her team. Katherine tries to take all the opportunities for courses, development and shadowing and encourages her team and the wider finance team to do the same. She also tries to build networks of colleagues and friends across NHS finance and has found that supportive when there have been difficult problems to solve – she is still regularly in touch with her graduate scheme cohort and colleagues from a more recent aspiring leaders programme.

Katherine is also on the local HFMA branch committee and the Future Focused Finance Diversity and Inclusion delivery group and is committed to making changes in her organisation and making NHS finance a fantastic place to work whatever your background.

The reason she applied to be a part of the mentoring programme is that she has been lucky enough to have great mentors who she needed at particular times in her career and helped her focus on what she needed to do to make that next step in her career, and she would really like to feel she can make that difference to someone else.