Sarah Morgan
Director of Organisational Development
Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust
Sarah is a member of the Bootstrappers Action Research Group. As part of the creation and testing of our OD Blueprint, Sarah mapped her own OD activity. This helped us understand the model better before we shared it more widely. Here, Sarah describes her process and findings.
Foundations for change
Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust have been working in partnership together over the past two years to determine if you can get the benefits of a merger or acquistion through collaboration rather than the distracting and often destructive process of an organisational structure change.
The New Care Models Vanguard Programme has enabled this work to be accelerated and is called the Foundation Healthcare Group. The work has been under the auspice of the Acute Care Collaboration Vanguard Programme for the past 18 months and has been undertaken at two levels. Firstly at the Board level, with the two Executive Team forming a Committee in Common which governs the programme overall but also ensures that there is an equal partnership, despite the asymmetry that exists between the two organisations (GSTT £1.4bn turnover and 15,000 staff; DGT £250m turnover and 3,000 staff). Secondly at the clinical level with three clinical specialities looking at different models of care across the boundaries of not only the two organisations but also two STPs and two counties: South East London and Kent.
This work has take a significant amount of time and effort from individuals and teams from both organisations and there has been a real commitment to seeing how far collaboration can take us within the NHS.
In order to examine the OD interventions that have taken place and the impact that they have, the framework has been used to plot the context and the impact that that had.
The mapping below on the framework attempts to demonstrate which level the intervention was working at; the level of complexity and where the impact was felt.
This has given an insight into which interventions had the most impact in the development of the Group and had surprising results in terms of the coaching being a relatively simple intervention that worked at many levels and had a significant impact.
Sarah Morgan
March 2018
A new architecture of Organisational Development 