Background: Heart of England (HEFT) are the leading foundation trust in the country, employing 10,000 staff providing general and specialist hospital care for the people of east Birmingham Solihull. Sutton Coldfield and South Staffordshire.

HEFT was invited to take on a management contract of Good Hope Hospital (GHH). Within six months the HEFT team had got GHH back in financial balance.

From the outset HEFT were clear that they wanted to increase the capability and capacity of the organisation to create a single, joined up team working together across all of its sites. In doing so HEFT wanted to create a single healthcare system that put its patients first in everything they did.
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Solution/Process: Q. Learning facilitated the decision by the GHH Board to seek integration into HEFT and coached the Directors on what they should do next. Q. Learning also put in a Programme Director for the integration to set up workstreams for full integration which started to move at a pace. The CEO wanted it to be an opportunity for both GHH and HEFT to really benefit from the integration of people, processes and systems.

Q. Learning was a natural choice for HEFT to select as its organisational development partner. In supporting HEFT in creating its vision for the future, Q. Learning had immersed itself in what it meant to be HEFT and understood where it wanted to be in the future. The executive team knew that the learning and development would need to be different, engaging and exciting and Q. Learning had demonstrated that it could be all of these things and more!

In partnership with HEFT, Q. Learning designed the organisational development strategy in 3 phases. Phase 1 would deliver a successful merger with GHH, Phase 2 would support the development and embedding of a single culture across the organisation and Phase 3 would develop the organisation’s capability to develop solutions working across organisational boundaries.
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Outcome: The programme touched everyone of the 5,000 staff at HEFT and many of the other 3,000 staff at GHH. During this time, there was a wonderful evening when HEFT was given the HSJ award for the Best Acute Hospital – thereby demonstrating that it is possible to keep your eye fully on current performance as well as negotiating your way through a merger!