HFMA 2018: NHS subsidiaries can be beneficial

On the opening day of the association’s annual conference, Lorraine Christopher (pictured) – the managing director of Barnsley Facilities Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust – said it was important to be a caring employer.

The subsidiary was set up in 2012 and has three aims in its three-year plan. These focus on people, high-quality services and financial performance. Ms Christopher said: ‘If you have the right people and they feel valued they will automatically deliver high-quality services because they care.’

She acknowledged staff were wary at first, though they were TUPE’d across with their NHS terms and conditions intact.’

New staff do not receive the NHS pension, but are given a higher salary and training on how to use that money – for example, to save for a mortgage.

The subsidiary has been able to reduce sickness absence from more than 7% to between 1% and 2%. It has done this by offering bonuses of £500 every six months to all staff with 100% attendances.

Also, previously outsourced services, including cleaning, have been brought back in-house to the wholly owned subsidiary. Lower graded staff are often trained in other jobs, giving the subsidiary greater flexibility in how it deploys its staff and also giving staff the opportunity to pick up additional shifts around the hospital.

Keely Firth, a non-executive director of the trust who is on the subsidiary’s board, said: ‘If you do the things we have done, the benefit will be around 1% of turnover in the first year – from the second year onwards 0.5%.’

She added that giving management time to the services might seem counterintuitive, but it produced significant benefits, raising the quality of support services and allowing clinicians to get on with treating patients.