Deborah Kelly appointed as Chief Nurse Officer (CNO) for Croydon Health Services NHS whilst Trust Chief Operating Officer steps down after half a decade in Croydon.
Dear colleagues,
I am delighted to inform you that following a formal recruitment process, Deborah Kelly has been appointed as our new Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) Director of Infection, Prevention and Control (DiPC) and Executive Director of Midwifery, Allied Health Professionals and Quality for Croydon Health Services NHS Trust.
With over 35 years NHS experience, Deborah has held a number of senior nursing and managerial roles at major London teaching hospitals.
Deborah was previously the Chief Nurse for Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust. Since qualifying as a nurse in 1985, Deborah has gained experience in a range of leadership roles in community, acute and tertiary services, including as Deputy Chief Nurse for Barts Health NHS Trust and working in the Middle East as the Deputy Chief Nurse and Chief Nurse for Informatics at Sidra Medicine, Doha Qatar.
Deborah will have an integral role in transforming the ambitions of our five year clinical strategy into reality, improving care for local people and ensuring that we support local people to live healthier lives for longer and that we are there to care for them when they need us most.
As well as heading up our nursing, midwifery and allied health professional teams, Deborah will be responsible for leading the delivery of quality improvements in patient care, both at Croydon University and Purley War Memorial Hospitals and in our vital community services.
Her dedication to patient and public engagement has previously been cited as best practice internationally by the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health 2017 and she successfully partnered with the Kings Fund in 2015/16 through the Collaborative Pairs Programme.
Deborah’s appointment will strengthens our existing executive team, providing robust leadership for our nursing, midwifery and allied health professional workforce. I am pleased to welcome her to Team Croydon and look forward to her making all the difference to the care provided to our local population.
I’d like to thank the fantastic Nicola Shopland, who took on this role on an interim basis, providing stability and support whilst we recruited substantively and has done an excellent job in doing so – leading our nursing colleagues as they continued to provide care through many periods of industrial action and celebrating our newest cohorts of international nurses. I know she will carry on in this regard until January, guiding our teams through the depths of winter, and then returning to her role as Deputy Chief Nurse.
And as we welcome a new CNO, we say goodbye to our longstanding Chief Operating Officer, Lee McPhail, who will be stepping down as of 31 December 2023, after five years’ service.
Half a decade in Croydon has earned Lee the title of the longest serving COO in south west London in recent years, having led the Trust’s operational response to COVID-19 and championed service improvement and innovation at a regional and national level throughout the delivery of our subsequent elective recovery programme.
Of course, his commitment to ensuring the delivery of safe and high performing services extends far beyond the pandemic, with his work to ensure operational resilience in the face of increasing demand and drive to create even more opportunities for joint working across the borough’s health and care partners, praised nationally by NHS England.
Thanks to Lee’s efforts, the Trust was selected as one of just six national frontrunners to help people to return home after a hospital admission, with our NHS and social care teams benefitting from almost a million pounds worth of investment, allowing us to free-up hospital beds so people can be admitted more quickly from A&E to wards, reducing pressure and reducing pressure on the borough’s health and care system.
Lee has also been pivotal in the rebuild of our critical care unit. A new, state of the art facility to care for our most seriously ill patients was one of his first commitments as Chief Operating Officer and has come to fruition under his leadership. The unit is due to open at the end of this year and will be just one of a number of Lee’s lasting legacies, demonstrating the huge impact he has had on the Trust and the way we deliver care in Croydon.
With over 25 years’ experience in the NHS, Lee has worked in some of the Capital’s most prominent NHS Trusts, including leading operational roles at UCLH and Barts Health NHS Trust as well as his time here in Croydon.
Commenting on his departure, Lee said:
“It has been a privilege to work with so many staff across the Trust over the last 5 years, as well as with our fantastic partners in the One Croydon Alliance and the South West London system – the Local Authority, GP collaborative and our ICB colleagues to name but a few.
“In my time as COO I have frequently found myself in the position of having to ask Operational Leaders, Clinical Directors and their teams and others to go above and beyond in their efforts to respond to the challenges that we have faced in recent times. Without exception they have never failed to respond.
“I’ll be forever grateful and proud of how this organisation – and our operational leadership teams – responded to extraordinary and often horrendous circumstances of the pandemic. Those individual and collective efforts truly demonstrated the potential of Team Croydon – both with the hospital and across our outstanding community services!
“Despite the ongoing daily challenges and pressures faced by the NHS, we have continued to embrace new and innovative ways of working to improve the care we provide to our patients through schemes including virtual ward, telemedicine and new cancer diagnostics, as well as securing additional funding for the development and improvement in our services such as additional planned care capacity and diagnostics in the community.
“I will be leaving the Trust with no doubts in my mind on how the organisation – and all of you – will continue to go from strength to strength. My sincere thanks for all that you have done and all that you continue to do.”
We are incredibly grateful to Lee for his dedication to Croydon over the past five years and for the huge efforts he has put in to lead our operational services and support all of us in our work. Whilst we will be very sad to see him move on, the work he has done to support Croydon’s health and care system in responding to increasing demand and working more closely together, leaves us in the best position possible as we head into another winter period.
His leadership and strong vision for how we deliver healthcare now, and in the future, has not only seen our elective recovery from the pandemic labelled ‘a blueprint’ for the wider NHS but has also allowed us to secure millions in funding to improve patient flow and discharge, working with our community partners to do what is right for our patients.
I know that this commitment to doing what is right for our patients and our staff will remain with him as he embarks on a new challenge and I would like to thank him personally for all he has done here in Croydon.”
We will now begin the process to appoint to cover the breadth of Lee’s role and will share more details with you about this in due course.
Thank you
Matthew Kershaw
Chief Executive and Place-Based Leader for Health
