Comment / One NHS Finance – moving to the next stage

In September last year, for the first time ever we started a campaign to ask you, the NHS finance community, to share your views on current challenges and new ideas around how we shape the future of the function for the better. We wanted to engage with everyone working across the sector to help us make our NHS the best place to work for a career in finance. 

The online conversation ran for four weeks, where 2,000 of you logged into the discussion, together sharing over 14,000 contributions. This is a fantastic level of engagement, where real positivity towards the NHS finance function emerged. We want to build on this for the next stage of the conversation, which launches on 1 February.

From your feedback, insights, and ideas three main themes have emerged, which will be developed into programmes of work to take forward:

• Developing our people – which looks at training, development, and ways to nurture our talented colleagues throughout their career.
• Developing our community – which looks at making NHS finance a great place to work, where everyone has a voice and a platform to share best practice and collaborate.
• Developing our systems and processes – where we will develop a platform for the finance community to tackle and discuss the big issues we are all facing, such as our planning and reporting, systems, processes, and data sharing.

Overall, 70% of the conversation focused on our people, culture, behaviours, and community.

From Monday 1 February, for two weeks only, you all have the opportunity to re-join the conversation to help us develop the key themes that are emerging, and to tell us what you like, dislike or think is maybe missing from the ideas and priorities identified. This second workshop will build on the first event, which was launched at the Future-Focused Finance value-maker annual conference in September.

The second workshop is also an opportunity for you to share more of your innovative ideas to address these key themes. A crucial part this workshop is to engage with our finance colleagues to help us co-create the vision statement for NHS finance that clearly sets out your collective aspirations for the future.

The success of the second conversation relies on the engagement from you, and our finance colleagues at all levels across England.  Everyone’s contributions will help make a difference to the future of our function, and I encourage you to get involved.

Log on to the conversation at www.onenhsfinance.org.uk from Monday 1 February – and don’t forget, it is only open for two weeks. Please talk to your colleagues and encourage everyone to contribute on how we become #OneNHSFinance.