She started on the wards thirty years ago and never left.
In 1996, Josephine Ndiaye-Clarke started her first shift as a newly qualified staff nurse on Ward 7, the elderly care ward at Calder General Hospital. She was 22, had moved from Port Selwyn the week before and still remembers getting lost on the way to the staff canteen. Next month she will move into the chief executive’s office on the top floor of the same building, becoming the first nurse to lead the Calder and Ardle Hospitals Trust since it was formed.
The trust board confirmed her appointment on Monday after a national recruitment process. Ndiaye-Clarke, 52, has been the trust’s chief nursing officer for the past six years and acting chief executive since September, when her predecessor left for a post elsewhere. She will lead an organisation with three hospitals, around 9,000 staff and an annual budget of more than £800 million.
Thirty years on the same corridors
Her career has been unusual in its loyalty. In thirty years she has never worked for another employer. After Ward 7 she moved to the emergency department, where she spent eight years and became a sister, then trained as a specialist nurse in stroke care and helped set up the hospital’s first dedicated stroke unit. She moved into management in her late thirties, running the medical division before becoming deputy and then chief nursing officer.
Colleagues describe her as calm, direct and impossible to fool about what is happening on a ward. Several said she still walks the hospital every morning before her first meeting, and that she occasionally puts on a uniform and works a shift, most recently on the respiratory ward during last winter’s surge.
“Jo knows what a bad night on a ward feels like, because she has had hundreds of them,” said Pauline Grieve, a senior sister in the emergency department who trained alongside her in the 1990s. “When she says she understands why staff are tired, nobody rolls their eyes. That is worth more than any management qualification.”
The job ahead
She takes over at a difficult moment. The trust has some of the longest waiting lists in the region, with around 62,000 people waiting for planned treatment, and its emergency department missed the four-hour waiting target for more than four in ten patients in October. It has a nursing vacancy rate of about nine per cent and has spent heavily on agency staff. Inspectors rated it as requiring improvement last year, citing pressures on staffing and the condition of older buildings at the Ardle site.
In an interview in her temporary office, a small room with a view over the hospital car park, Ndiaye-Clarke said her priorities were straightforward: staffing, flow through the hospital and the buildings. She wants to cut agency spending by recruiting and keeping more permanent nurses, partly by offering more flexible shift patterns, and to reduce the number of patients who stay in hospital beds because they cannot be discharged to care at home.
“Every day I walk past patients who are well enough to go home and cannot, because the support is not there,” she said. “That is bad for them, and it means somebody in the emergency department is waiting on a trolley for their bed. Fixing that is not glamorous, but it is the single biggest thing we can do.”
She was cautious about the money. The trust is forecasting a deficit of around £14 million this year, and she said she would not promise anything she could not deliver. But she wants to finish the long-delayed refurbishment of the maternity unit at Calder General, which is due to begin in spring.
A signal to the workforce
Nursing unions welcomed the appointment. The regional officer of the nurses’ union, Callum Whitlock, said it sent “a powerful message to every healthcare assistant and student nurse that the top job is not reserved for people with business degrees”. Some consultants privately questioned whether a nurse would have the authority to drive changes in medical departments, though the trust’s medical director publicly backed her.
Ndiaye-Clarke shrugged off the doubts. Asked what she would miss about nursing, she paused for a long time. “The moment someone you have been worried about all night opens their eyes and asks for a cup of tea,” she said. “I am going to try very hard not to forget what that feels like.”
