Unearthing the turnaround team for financial recovery

Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board is a sizeable organisation with a Turnover of £1.3bn serving a population of c700,000 patients across six counties in North Wales. Services cover acute, primary, mental health and community care. The organisation has struggled to deliver these services within its annual budget for several years culminating in a significant financial crisis requiring the support of a turnaround and programme management office team.

Having recruited a Turnaround Director (TD) to lead the organisations’ financial recovery programme, we were tasked to embed a newly formed Programme Management Office (PMO) function. The function comprised a team of six interim managers skilled in driving efficiencies in complex and challenging environments to support the delivery of financial improvement across the health board.

We engaged with the CFO and TD to fully understand the nature of the brief and advised on resourcing a Head of PMO before embarking on building a team of PMO Consultants. We tested the market for available and credible talent, and now an extremely outstanding individual is working alongside a team of five, developing the function further.

The project is ongoing but is showing great promise, with a first-class alliance formed between Betsi Cadwaladr and Hunter Healthcare.