Member to member / The NHS has a real meaning for everyone

Mark Orchard joined the HFMA early on in his career and has since been a member of two branches, chaired one of them and been actively involved in the life of the Association. Last December, he became the president of the HFMA and chose “Everyone counts” as his theme. We spoke with him about his career in the NHS, his HFMA involvement and how networks can solve some of the problems facing the health service.

How did you start your NHS finance journey?

I joined the NHS in March 1998 after having spent a couple of post-graduate years working in a chartered accountancy practice as a trainee – everyone connected with the practice were amazing and I still keep in touch with former colleagues today, but I somehow struggled to find that extra intrinsic motivation that I so craved. That all changed for me when I joined the NHS in Wales – suddenly I felt part of something big and very meaningful. Something that connected me with places what were directly intertwined with my own family history – the hospital that I and my siblings were born in, the hospital in which I watched my grandfather’s life sadly but peacefully slip away. The happy and the sad times. The NHS has real meaning for everyone of course, and I needed no further excuse to embrace a career within the service.

I stayed in NHS Wales for five and a half years, working my way up through a specialist internal audit and consultancy team uniquely focused on capital and private finance initiative (PFI) funded schemes. This certainly added to my early fulfilment and took me all across Wales, and even as far afield as Liverpool and Jersey. I only “emigrated” to England when I realised what a lovely part of the world my then fiancée (now wife) was from. We decided to make the South of England our home and to plan for a family into the future. With that I soon took the decision to embrace a role in “mainstream” NHS finance.

Why did you get involved with the HFMA? How does the Association support your career development?

I started going along to ACCA Wales meetings quite early on in my professional studies. In that way I was a bit of a nerd when I look back! Whilst these meetings were all very interesting, much of the content was not directly relevant to my lived workplace experience. Quite quickly into my NHS journey I stumbled upon the HFMA Welsh branch – from memory, possibly through a connection with ACCA Wales at the time – and it didn’t take too long for me to sign up as a member. As much as anything, the Healthcare Finance journal was one of the only reading sources available to me at the time that was dedicated to covering articles of direct relevance and interest to what I was doing day-to-day.

When I relocated to the South of England, I switched branches from Wales to Wessex (a branch that no longer exists and was subsequently split in two directions – South West and South Central). There I met colleagues such as Bill Shields, who would go on to become my professional lead at an impressionable time when I would later move from deputy director of finance to director of finance level, and also of course, Bill would later also become national chairman of HFMA. When the branch boundaries were changed I opted to join the South West and have been a proud supporter ever since – especially having the opportunity to chair the branch a few years ago and to help facilitate the seamless bringing together of South West FSD and South West HFMA into a singular and effective oversight arrangement, partly bound together under our South West accreditation scheme.

The HFMA has always been there for me. At different points in my career I have leaned on HFMA for support in different ways appropriate to my need at the time. This has included identifying an experienced director of finance mentor at a time when I first took the brave step into my first director role at Bournemouth and Poole.

What’s the most important HFMA member benefit for you?

This is a difficult one, and probably partly explains why we sometimes struggle to convince those that don’t want to be convinced to consider joining. For me, first and foremost, this is my professional association. I simply could not imagine not being a member of my professional association. How odd would that be? I am of course a fully paid up member of ACCA and that gives me my licence to operate if you like, but HFMA gives me access to the support I need to operate effectively. That’s the difference.  Whether it is accessing technical information via webinars, conferences and literature, providing financial skills support to colleagues clinical and non-clincial, networking opportunities to share and learn from others, or simply feeling part of my professional group – HFMA provides all of this for me and more, and will continue to do so for the entire remainder of my NHS career – finance or otherwise – I am sure.

How did you come up with the Everyone counts theme? What’s behind it?

In the end this was easy. My early involvement with Future-Focused Finance was centred around embracing the whole of our function at all levels and also embracing colleagues beyond our professional boundaries. Quite early on one of our early clinical champions invited us to “stop counting beans” and to “make people count” which of course went on to be adapted as the main strapline underpinning FFF. This is something that has stayed with me and was always, I guess, going to be a feature of my theme.

However, quite bizarrely in hindsight, I spent what felt like an entire age trying to find the right words to articulate this in a way that worked for me beyond FFF – and would hopefully stand the test of time, within a couple of short words. My team at Poole started to get a bit worried (not least because the shortlisted options I had pulled together were a bit rubbish to be honest) so my deputy ran a bit of an internal challenge to come up with my theme. After pouring through lots of rejected suggestions on email I remember “everyone counts” coming in amongst a list of rejectables and just knowing – there and then - that this was the one. Thanks team!

What piece of advice do you have for others in NHS finance and people who are starting their NHS finance journey now?

Do you know what, I read something on twitter from David Nicholson the other day when asked a similar question and he said simply and in less than 140 characters: “… greatest job in the world, keep your integrity, don’t sign up to things you know you can’t deliver and every person counts”. I don’t think I can improve on that really other than that I would always encourage colleagues to keep their networks as broad as possible – the NHS is such a small place and we are always guilty of trying to solve the same problems in different places, so being better equipped to make connections will always give you a fighting start.