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The chair has a unique role in leading the Trust’s Board of Directors.

The role combines the duty to lead effective governance, consistent with the Nolan principles and NHS values, with securing a long-term vision and strategy for the organisation.

Fundamentally, the chair is responsible for the effective leadership of the board and the council of governors.  They are pivotal in creating the conditions necessary for overall board and individual director effectiveness.

Central to the chair’s role are five key responsibilities:

1.    strategic: ensuring the board sets the trust’s long-term vision and strategic direction and holding the chief executive to account for achieving the trust’s strategy,

2.    people: creating the right tone at the top, encouraging diversity, change and innovation, and shaping an inclusive, compassionate, patient-centred culture for the organisation,

3.    professional acumen: leading the board, both in terms of governance and managing relationships internally and externally,

4.    outcomes focus: achieving the best sustainable outcomes for patients/ service users by encouraging continuous improvement, clinical excellence and value for money,

5.    partnerships: building system partnerships and balancing organisational governance priorities with system collaboration; this role will become increasingly more important as local organisations move to delivering integrated care, prioritising population health in line with the NHS Long Term Plan

The relationship between the chair and the trust’s chief executive is key to the role’s success. 
Together, the chair and the chief executive set the tone for the whole organisation. They are ultimately responsible for ensuring that the population the trust serves and the wider system in which the organisation sits receive the best possible care in a sustainable way.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

1.         Strategic

·         ensuring the whole board of directors plays a full part in developing and determining the trust’s vision, values, strategy and overall objectives to deliver organisational purpose and sustainability while having regard to the council of governors’ views,

·         ensuring the trust’s strategy aligns with the principles guiding the NHS and the NHS values,

·         ensuring the board identifies the key risks the trust faces in implementing its strategy; determines its approach and attitude to providing effective oversight of those risks and ensures there are prudent controls to assist in managing risk,

·        holding the chief executive to account for delivering the strategy and performance.

2.         People

·         providing visible leadership in developing a healthy, open and transparent patient-centred culture for the organisation, where all staff have equality of opportunity to progress, the freedom to speak up is encouraged, and ensuring that this culture is reflected and modelled in their own and in the board’s behaviour and decision-making,

·         leading and supporting a constructive dynamic within the board, enabling grounded debate with contributions from all directors.

·         promoting the highest standards of ethics, integrity, probity and corporate governance throughout the organisation and particularly on the board,

·         demonstrating visible ethical, compassionate and inclusive personal leadership by modelling the highest standards of personal behaviour and ensuring the board follows this example,

·         ensuring that constructive relationships based on candour, trust and mutual respect exist between executive and non-executive directors and between elected and appointed members of the council of governors and between the board and the council,

·         developing effective working relationships with all the board directors, particularly the chief executive, providing support, guidance and advice.

 In their role developing the board’s capacity and capability, the trust chair is responsible for:

·         ensuring the board behaves as a team, has the right balance and diversity of skills, knowledge and perspectives, and the confidence to challenge on all aspects of clinical and organisational planning; this includes:

§  regularly reviewing the board’s composition and sustainability with the chief executive and the nominations committee,

§  considering succession planning and remuneration for the board, including attracting and developing future talent working with the board, council of governors and nominations and remuneration committees as appropriate,

§  considering the suitability and diversity of non-executive directors who are assigned as chairs and members of the board’s committees, such that as far as possible they reflect the workforce and respective communities served by the board,

§  where necessary, leading in seeking the removal of non-executive directors and giving counsel in the removal of executive directors.

·         leading on continual director governor development of skills, knowledge and familiarity with the organisation and health and social care system, to enable them to carry out their role on the board/council effectively, including through:

§  induction programmes for new directors/governors,

§  ensuring annual evaluation of the board/council’s performance, the board’s committees, and the directors/governors in respect of their board/council contribution and development needs, acting on the results of these evaluations and supporting personal development planning,

§  taking account of their own development needs through, for example, personal reflection, peer learning and mentoring/reverse mentoring as part of the wider NHS provider chair community,

·        developing a board that is genuinely connected to and assured about staff and patient experience, as demonstrated by appropriate feedback and other measures, including the Workforce Race Equality Standard (WRES); Workforce Disability Equality Standard (WDES); and Equality Delivery System (EDS).

3.         Partnerships

·       promoting an understanding of the board’s role, and the role of non-executive and executive directors,

·         representing the organisation externally, developing and facilitating effective partnerships

·         ensuring that effective communication with stakeholders creates board debate encompassing diverse views, and giving sufficient time and consideration to complex, contentious or sensitive issues.

·         facilitating the council of governors’ work on member engagement, so the governors can carry out their statutory duty to represent the interests of trust members and the general public to the trust.

·         ensuring that governors have the dialogue with directors they need to hold the non-executive directors (which includes the trust chair), individually and collectively to account for the board’s performance. 

4.         Professional acumen

·         making sure the board/council operates effectively and understands its own accountability and compliance with its approved procedures.

·         personally doing the right thing, ethically and in line with the NHS values, demonstrating this to and expecting the same behaviour from the board.

·         leading the board in establishing effective and ethical decision-making processes.

·         setting an integrated board/council agenda relevant to the trust’s current operating environment and taking full account of the important strategic issues and key risks it faces this should be aligned with the annual planner for council of governors meetings.

·         ensuring that the board/council receives accurate, high quality, timely and clear information, that the related assurance systems are fit for purpose and that there is a good flow of information between the board, its committees, the council and senior management team.

·         ensuring board committees are properly constituted and effective.

·         leading the board in being accountable to governors and leading the council in holding the board to account.

 In their role as facilitator of the board and of the council of governors, the chair is responsible for:

·         providing the environment for agile debate that considers the big picture

·         ensuring the board/council collectively and individually applies sufficient challenge, balancing the ability to seize opportunities while retaining robust and transparent decision-making

·         facilitating the effective contribution of all members of the board/council, drawing on their individual skills, experience and knowledge and in the case of non-executive directors, their independence

·         working with and supporting the Director of Corporate Governance in establishing and maintaining the board’s annual cycle of business

·         liaising with and consulting the senior independent director.

 5.         Outcomes focus

·         ensuring all board members are well briefed on external context – eg policy, integration, partnerships and societal trends

·         fostering a culture of innovation and learning, by being outward-looking, promoting and embedding innovation, technology and transformation through the board/council’s business and debate,

·         promoting academic excellence and research as a means of taking health and care services forward,

·         ensuring performance is accurately measured against constitutional and Care Quality Commission ‘well-led’ standards,

·         ensuring performance on equality, diversity and inclusion for all patients and staff is accurately measured and progressed against national frameworks, including WRES, WDES and EDS,

·         above all, ensuring the board maintains an unrelenting interest in and focus on the continuous improvement and self-assessment of patient safety, experience and clinical outcomes.