We are UHB: Charlotte Joberns, General Manager - General Surgery and Emergency General Surgery

University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust runs Good Hope, Heartlands, Queen Elizabeth and Solihull hospitals, the Birmingham Chest Clinic, and Solihull community services.

When I finished school, I went to university to study film production with the aim of becoming a camera operator and I have great memories of doing some behind-the-scenes jobs, whilst trying to build a film career. However, I quickly found that the camera and I were simply not meant to be, and I became a bit lost in knowing what to do next.

This led to various retail leadership roles at Game, Nando’s, and Enterprise, but I decided to take a leap of faith and apply for an office manager position at University Hospitals Birmingham (UHB). Whilst I was unsuccessful in getting the position, it led to me being able to apply for a group support administrator position (now known as an operational support administrator). I was successful at interview for that post, started in January 2017 and I have truthfully never looked back!

I started my UHB career with the trauma and orthopaedics team, as a group support administrator. This role gave me a basic understanding and experience of operations, whilst also allowing me to cross cover my colleagues in areas such as data validation and rota management. With my previous leadership experience, I was then successful in progressing into my first operations manager role within trauma and orthopaedics six months later. I have been fortunate to work with a range of other specialties as an operations manager and have experience of working ?in the emergency, paediatrics, neonates and older person’s care departments. In 2021, I was then thrilled to start in my first general manager post in immunology, allergy, HIV and infectious diseases ?and am now currently working as a general manager with the general surgery and colorectal team.

Just like with all roles across the NHS, each day is very different. As a very basic overview of some responsibilities, each day involves working with your nursing, consultant, operational and finance colleagues to ensure that patients are being seen and treated within safe and reasonable timeframes. Working within general surgery and colorectal means that the general manager will be required to review outpatient and inpatient capacity daily across both cancer and non-cancer pathways. They will very closely work with their operational team to amend the capacity to accommodate more patients, if possible.

Whilst progressing with those patients that we can give dates to, we will work with the operations team to facilitate work in the background to prepare other patient pathways, so that they can be offered the next available date for outpatient, investigation and/or theatre. We also manage an emergency surgical pathway, which will require us to oversee patient flow from the emergency department and into the surgical assessment unit (SAU) and any subsequent treatment and/or outpatient follow-up for that patient.

As a general manager, you are an advocate for your specialty, and will be a senior point of contact for patients, their families and visitors and will subsequently respond concerns, complaints, and queries. There will be several meetings each day, but all these meetings are either to check in with teams and to discuss any current concerns or development works which are in progress. Additionally, a general manager will oversee and manage the budget ensuring that savings can be identified and delivered whilst also ensuring that staff members and purchases can be accounted for.

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