Life’s just too short to carry on working, says NHS chief leaving £295k job
‘The personal cost is just too high’
THE boss of an NHS hospital trust has quit her £295,000-a-year position after telling colleagues ‘life is too short’ to carry on.
Siobhan McArdle sent a blunt email to staff saying that the ‘personal costs’ of the job were too high.
She claims she had been working under ‘challenging’ financial and regulatory conditions.
Mrs McArdle’s salary of up to £295,000 last year included a one- off bonus of £53,000 for previously worked overtime. In addition, she was given pension benefits of £92,000, which put her total pay package for 2018/19 at just under £390,000.
Mrs McArdle, 51, who has been chief executive of the South Tees Hospitals trust since October 2015, announced her resignation to colleagues yesterday. Her email, which was leaked to the Health Service Journal, stated: ‘After much debate with my family and friends over the last 12 months, I have now decided that the personal cost of being a CEO in the NHS is just too high and life is just too short.
‘I hope you all know that I have absolutely given it my all over the last four years and have had a great time at South Tees, reconnecting with lots of old friends whilst also making many, many new ones.’
Earlier on in the email she joked: ‘I think it is fair to say, given my reputation for straight speaking, I have lasted far longer than anyone, including me, thought I would – in fact I have exceeded the average term of office of three years for newly appointed CEOs in the NHS by a year and so I am now obviously considering a career in football management as my next move.’
Mrs McArdle told colleagues that the trust – which has around 9,000 staff and runs two hospitals in Teesside and North Yorkshire – is ‘ not an organisation that requires improvement’.
She added: ‘I have always done my utmost to defend and promote the interests of our organisation. And I have done so within a very challenging financial and regulatory environment, in a local health economy that I believe is underfunded and unsustainable.’
South Tees has repeatedly missed waiting time targets for A&E, cancer and elective or ‘routine’ operations. Just over a quarter of cancer patients are not treated within two months of being diagnosed, while one in ten patients wait longer than 18 weeks for routine surgery.
Mrs McArdle, who will leave at the end of the month, did not specify what she was going to do next. She has previously worked as a management consultant and a ‘transformation director’.
But her resignation highlights the ongoing problem for the NHS of recruiting high- class bosses who are willing to stay on and see the job through.
The average chief executive is only in post for three years which is not enough time to turn around a failing hospital and reverse waiting times.
Many are offered hugely generous salaries to lure them away from other hospitals only for them to leave shortly afterwards to work in areas such as management consultancy.
Alan Downey, chairman of South Tees Hospitals, said: ‘The board of directors, council of governors and I are sorry that Siobhan has decided to resign as chief executive after serving the trust so well.’
Harry Fone, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘If any high-paid bureaucrat feels no longer up to the job then it is right they resign.
‘When they decide to walk the taxpayer is no longer left paying their cushy public sector salary and gilt-edged pension. We can only hope in this case that taxpayers will not be left footing the bill for a golden goodbye.’