It’s been a stressful, at times exciting, and often humbling experience to be a council chief executive over the past eight months. We’ve moved more quickly than we have before, been more flexible in how we achieve the aims for our communities, and gained hugely in confidence, not least in how our workforce operate. Having spent the past five years working to lift the confidence level of my colleagues to match their professional competence, the response to COVID-19 has done that for us in a very short time, along with advances in digital working that we could only have dreamed of. The task now for us is to choose what we want to retain and develop.
Like most other local authorities, Staffordshire CC has an Incident Management Team to manage floods, fires, accidents etc, which worked in distinct response and recovery phases; it had been well worked up through the previous 12 months with Storm Dennis, heath fires in the Moorlands, the collapse of Allied Healthcare etc. Very quickly, it became obvious that the pace and duration of this operation was such that this was a whole council activity – we needed to mobilise and rapidly build the capability and capacity, accepting risk in some areas while bolstering those under the greatest pressure. The same very quickly became obvious with regard to response and recovery; these were simultaneous, not sequential and needed the capacity and capability to match.
iCount was an internal campaign launched at the end of March for council employees to volunteer to change roles. At that point, we were not entirely sure what jobs needed to be done, but it was focused on resourcing the Shielding Operation for the Clinically Extremely Vulnerable (CEV), and maintaining the capability in Staffordshire’s 243 care homes and 450 home care providers. A key part of that was to build and maintain a robust and resilient supply chain for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE).
Within two weeks, we had more than 850 volunteers ready to deploy. Some skills were transferable, such as library staff who had a particular affinity through customer service experience with the CEV. The Health and Safety team formed the core of the PPE supply chain, which was helpful in terms of advice on requirement and usage; we ordered our first PPE on 10 March and were delivering a week later – no Staffordshire care home went without PPE at any point. Some tasks fell away as the operation developed. We accepted significant risk in undertaking one-day courses in personal care to backfill care and nursing homes; in the event, only a handful of the 100 volunteers were required, as the homes’ own workforces held up remarkably well.
We have continually reviewed the requirement, and it is notable that our decision-action cycle is much quicker than it has ever been. The current focus is on building a local Test and Trace workforce of around 150, using a combination of internal and external volunteers. With eight months gone, and probably another six to go, fatigue, stress and mental well-being are increasingly significant factors. I keep hearing people saying that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. In my opinion, that’s only half-right, in that it’s a distance event, but it’s more like a relay race than a marathon. There are days during which we are working flat out, but equally there are days when the pace slackens off. The key considerations for me are teamwork, and not feeling guilty about stepping back when the opportunity arises.
One of my colleagues shared with me early in the response that he was actually really enjoying work and felt a little guilty that he had that feeling. That is not unusual, as local government is achieving magnificently across the country. The other thing that I am hearing from many colleagues is, ‘let’s not go back to the old ways’. As a result, we are working on ‘Choosing the New Normal’ as we are referring to it – making conscious choices about which aspects of what we’ve learned and changed we want to retain, and which will become memories.
John Henderson is chief executive of Staffordshire CC
