News / FDs urged to declare support for FFF effort

30 June 2014

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By Steve Brown

NHS finance directors are being encouraged to join 115 of their colleagues across England by signing declarations of support for the Future-focused finance (FFF) finance development strategy.

The strategy sets outs a vision for how the NHS finance function needs to evolve to maximise the value it delivers and how it can best support the achievement of best value healthcare. The declarations have been developed as part of the ‘great place to work’ action area – one of six action areas identified in three themes.

The declarations demonstrate finance directors are committed to the aims of FFF. By signing, finance directors also promise to ‘create space and resource’ for their teams to participate, as well as hold their own launch event with their teams.

‘It is great that we have had such a big, immediate and enthusiastic response,’ said Cathy Kennedy, deputy chief executive and chief financial officer at North East Lincolnshire Clinical Commissioning Group and senior responsible officer for the ‘great place to work’ workstream.

‘But we really want to build this across the whole English NHS finance director community.’

The joint census of finance staff by the HFMA and Finance Skills Development in 2013 puts the total director figure at just over 460.

‘The declarations are a great way for finance directors to increase the visibility of their support for their teams and of the commitment to develop staff and the function in general,’ Ms Kennedy added.

‘If finance directors haven’t signed up yet, I’d encourage them to do so as soon as possible.’

Directors are asked to supplement their declarations with ideas for how they will take the initiative forward locally. These have so far included promises to embed the FFF aims and structure into local staff development plans, undertaking surveys to establish an organisation’s financial needs and producing a statement of financial excellence in support of clinical excellence.

As a further part of the same workstream, 20 NHS bodies have now been selected to pilot work place assessments in finance departments.