Senior Charity Salaries. A blog/rant.

Don't panic -I'm not at it again. I wrote this blog back in 2015 in my final months at Myton Hospice but have been asked to publish here on LinkedIn. Anyway... for those charity salary critics that didn't see it the first time, enjoy, and for those that you didn't feel fully ranted at first time round, feel free to relive the experience.

I graduated from university with a guy called Dave, same Public Sector Management Degree, same result, same experience and enthusiasm for our future. I got my first job with a charity and he got a job with BUPA. I have remained in the voluntary sector, whilst he has gone on to work for various commercial companies and is now with a soft drink company. His bonus for last year was more than I was paid. Why do I bother telling you this, good for him – I hear you say and what? More fool me?  More fool me that despite taking home a good salary that reflects the time, effort and complexity of my role, I have decided to use the skills and energy I have been blessed with to make, even a tiny contribution, to the lives of people who are vulnerable and often desperate. Many of these have been let down by the same commercial and statutory organisations that cream the best and brightest from our schools, colleges and universities with the lure of big rewards.

This week Myton, my much loved hospice, has had an onslaught of press coverage about how much my Senior Management team and I are paid.  And yes… I have taken it personally.  Let’s just consider what they didn’t say. Let’s take our sales team first… our Fundraisers.  My Director of Income Generation has a target of 117 times her salary – yep, I typed it right 117 times. What does she get if she achieves it? Nothing, no bonuses or commission paid here. What does she get if she doesn’t achieve it? The pain of seeing services cut and a gut wrenching guilt that somehow, she is personally to blame. Not the journalist who, by misleading our supporters, reduce our income and affect who we can help.

What about the other ‘overheads’. My Director of Finance has the responsibility for ensuring every single penny we spend on non-salaries at Myton is spent wisely. That is about ￡4.5 million spent over some 30,000 transactions.  This financial year she has already saved over ￡100k and just yesterday she was successful in getting a revaluation of our VAT, saving us a further ￡25k. She is technically excellent, highly skilled and very persuasive and pretty much pays her own way through the saving she haggles.

My Director of Strategy spends time liaising with the NHS to ensure we work together as collaboratively as possible. Anyone who thinks that because we are a charity we escape the bureaucracy of the NHS, think again.  In fact it is worse, because being non-NHS we are rarely consulted on changes to patients, payments or monitoring that radically affect us. His time is spent ensuring that the NHS considers our far more cost effective and significantly higher quality options for care when they go through their numerous change initiatives.  In the last 4 months he has negotiated a ￡200k contribution to 6 new palliative care beds for Coventry hospice, as a result we will be able to support up to 72 additional patients next year. Again, we need to attract and employ staff that understand the NHS commissioning but are prepared to earn about 20% less than they would if they just worked for the NHS.

The Director of Nursing then, surely you can get nurses for cheap? Ours runs an organisation that has a 98% patient and family satisfaction rate, just 3 complaints in the 2014-15 year, 98% of patients say they are treated with dignity and respect. They have to retain nurses in a national nurse shortage, in a small organisation with limited career development opportunities. They deliver inpatient and community based care, they manage over 15 other specialism’s, from Chaplain’s to Art Therapists.  They manage increasing demand, increasing complexity and the pain of not being able to meet everyone’s needs, with a team of nursing staff working at the very cutting edge of psychologically demanding work.  You might say that that is no different to the NHS, BUT of course it is important to remember that it is more than just necessary that every single patient has an outstanding experience at Myton because they deserve and require it. Our entire voluntary income is based on our reputation as an amazing provider of end of life care, getting it wrong with just one family could have a devastating effect on the entire operation.  No pressure there then.

So that just leaves the Director of Medicine and Me.  Looking to our Doctors first. I hope you are never in the position of having to be transferred to our specialist hospice unit because your pain and symptoms, as you die, are so severe they cannot be resolved in Hospital. But if you ever are, look me in the eye and tell me you feel I could probably pay my Doctors a little less.  This situation happens every week, indeed most days. When patients arrive with us, we are a last hope of a peaceful death. I’m sorry if the Times feel offended that I will not compromise the ability of the Doctor that deals with our desperate families at that moment by employing more junior or less skilled medical staff.

So finally me. Well, what does any CEO do? Me or the one running Adam’s soft drinks company? Lead, drive, comfort? Chief cheerleader, arbiter, influencer, defender. These are challenging times for all charities, public scrutiny of what we do is increasing and I welcome that. Some charities may not be well run, mine is – I welcome people who take the time out to understand that.  

Many of the UK biggest social problems are dealt with solely by its charities. We don’t want to remain a sticking plaster for people who have nowhere else to turn; we want to solve their problems once and for all. I want every single person in Coventry and Warwickshire to live well and have a good, natural death, the way they want it to be with their loved ones supported, but I must attract the best and brightest if I have a cat in hells chance of achieving it, because the NHS hasn’t and neither has the private sector… despite the bonuses.