Annex A > Chapter 8 - Management and Culture of the UBH and the UBHT > The management of the UBHT under the leadership of Mr Ross
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The management of the UBHT under the leadership of Mr Ross
258 Mr Ross told the Inquiry that when he took up his post in succession to Dr Roylance, he discovered that Mrs Maisey was in large part responsible for day-to-day operational matters, rather than Dr Roylance. He said:
`I felt that almost all of the day to day operational management of the Trust in terms of the business of the Trust had been devolved to the Director of Operations, which was a model, as I say, it is not unusual, but not one that I had previously worked with myself.' [295]
259 Mr Ross had heard the clinical directorates under Dr Roylance described as `semi-detached'. [296] Dr Thorne, by contrast, thought the clinical directorates were `quite well integrated'. [297] However, despite the `semi-detached' description, when Mr Ross arrived at Bristol he found that the clinical director's role was one that he was familiar with from his earlier experience in the health service. He said:
`[It] was a fairly standard Clinical Director role; there was no job description for the post that I could find and I set out to create one, but the role had been spelled out ... quite carefully by my predecessor, because of his feelings about the importance of involving the senior doctors in the Trust fully in the management of the Trust ... But it was a Clinical Director role, not unlike that I was familiar with elsewhere.' [298]
260 However, Mr Ross felt there was little central direction at the UBHT when he arrived. He said:
`I did feel, when I came to the Trust, that the devolution to the directorates had gone too far and that the overall performance of the organisation was not as tightly controlled and managed as it needed to be. As the new Chief Executive, I felt a little nervous about that, if I am frank, and have worked since then to try and get the right balance between the local ownership and responsibility that I talked about and the need to performance manage the whole organisation in a very tight and proactive manner, especially as the expectations placed upon the Trust by government grow greater with each year.' [299]
261 Mr Ross also encountered the `club culture' at Bristol. He said:
`... it certainly was a strong feeling when I arrived from General Managers that issues like promotion within the Trust and so on were not decided necessarily on objective grounds, based on individual reviews and performance reviews and so on, but on some less easily measurable factors and things like fit or, you know, whether you were in, those were the sorts of things they said to me they thought were more influential in deciding issues of promotion and so on than perhaps objective measurements of their success in doing their job.' [300]
262 Mr Ross explained that the oral culture fostered by Dr Roylance had been preserved under his own leadership of the UBHT. Mr Ross said:
`... that is still the culture. The pace and complexity with which we work demands that many things are said once and done, and I think if we put everything in writing, the whole organisation would grind to a halt. So there is still an oral culture at director level to a large extent and I think it is fair to say that is what I inherited.' [301]
`... I think if things get put in writing, it means they are important, and they need to be put into writing because they are important.' [302]
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