The Only National Awards For Non-Medical / Non-Clinical NHS Staff & Volunteers

Nomination

Award Category:

Corporate Services

Individual or Team Nomination?

Team

Nominators Answer

Nominee's story :

We would like to nominate the finance and procurement department of Mersey Care who like many other corporate services, were impacted significantly due to COVID. The first significant impact was completing a set of final accounts (2019/20) with all staff and auditors working remotely. Accounts were completed successfully with a clean set of unqualified accounts submitted on time. Regardless of the COVID 1st wave, the deadlines for final accounts submission to Parliament remained in place for May 2020. The next most significant impact was the impact of COVID on Procurement. Procurement challenge was immense in the early wave of COVID with the supply and availability of PPE being incredibly challenged. Our procurement team were front and centre to this challenge, and ensured all of our services were safe. Feedback from Jenny Hurst, Deputy Director of Nursing was, "Colin and the team have been fantastic to ensure that adequate supply of PPE for all the trust allowing us to maintain patient and staff safety. He has provided daily assurance of our supply and nothing was ever too much trouble for him. Always happy to go that extra mile to make sure we as a trust have everything we needed through the pandemic to maintain safety." Our financial services team were impacted by the need to make quick payments to suppliers, with new, much shorter deadlines (goal -10 days to pay). Daily KPI monitoring by Gill McKetterick kept us on track and ensuring that we were able to keep our accounts payable functioning as a business critical function for the organisation and economy. In October, we changed our financial ledger system moving to NHS Shared Business Services, and in doing so were the first organisation nationally to achieve 100% virtual implementation. All training, and project deliverables were delivered virtually by off site support from SBS, and key finance team members particularly Natalie Hooper, and Ian Cartwright, without whom the achievement would not have been possible. Natalie worked tirelessly to support staff across the trust both within and outside finance, ensuring staff understood how the system worked and that services experienced as little disruption as possible, with extremely tight deadlines. The year has finished with an external assessment of finance staff development (Towards Excellence) Level 3 'Consistently Excellent'. Our assessors said, 'there is a strong sense that staff feel valued and supported, both managerially and also by their colleagues and peers. There is a sense that staff development is embedded and “lived” as part of the team culture, with a senior team that is “totally accessible”, and “values and behaviours that are lived”. The budget holders that were interviewed were extremely complimentary of the team. The finance teams ability to reinvent itself was noted several times and their complete commitment to the organisation’s values and behaviours; “they demonstrate these in everything they do”. Joe Rafferty the CEO, was extremely complimentary, he noted the finance team’s ability to present “the patient benefit case” as a measure of the level they are embedded as business partners."