First medical director and director of nursing appointed to lead integrated acute and specialist services for children and young people across west London
Acute and specialist services for children and young people across Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust are to have a joint medical director and a joint director of nursing. This is a key milestone for the Trusts’ west London children’s healthcare initiative, bringing together the management of these services under one leadership team to help improve outcomes and patient and staff experience.
Following an external recruitment process, Dr Simon Nadel has been appointed joint medical director and Herdip Sidhu-Bevan, joint director of nursing. They will report to Nicola Grinstead, managing director for west London children’s healthcare, who reports directly to chief executives for both trusts.
West London children’s healthcare is an initiative to develop more integrated, ‘user-centred’ care for children and young people with a stronger focus on health and wellbeing and disease prevention. It is developing shared ways of working across all of Chelsea and Westminster’s and Imperial College Healthcare’s acute and specialist children’s services to ensure best practice, reduce unnecessary variations and support closer collaboration with community and primary care partners. It is also working with Imperial College London to embed research and learning into the development of services and clinical practice.
Simon has been a consultant in children’s intensive care at St Mary’s Hospital since 1994 and holds an adjunct professorship in paediatric intensive care medicine with Imperial College. He brings a wealth of leadership experience from his previous roles as clinical director of women’s and children’s services at St Mary’s Hospital; lead clinician for paediatric intensive care; past president of the European Society for Paediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care and his role as trustee of Cosmic charity.
Herdip joins from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) where she is currently interim director of nursing. She is dual qualified in adult and paediatric nursing, including previous neonatal experience. She has extensive experience in nursing leadership and engagement with children and young people. Her role as director of nursing operations at GOSH enabled her to work across the north central London and provided the opportunity to manage general paediatrics. Her recent role at Moorfields Eye Hospital as deputy director of nursing covered a portfolio of nursing education, quality and workforce in both adult and paediatric nursing.
Managing director of the west London children’s healthcare initiative, Nicola Grinstead, said: “I am delighted to welcome Simon and Herdip at this critical point in our development. As key members of the team, tasked with both establishing and then leading our integrated services, they will help ensure that children, young people and their families as well as staff are involved in shaping every aspect of our work. They will also help us ensure that our organisations are brilliant places in which to work, learn and thrive”.
West London children’s healthcare services have a combined workforce of more than 1,500, across four main hospital sites – Chelsea and Westminster, Hammersmith, St Mary’s and West Middlesex. Collectively, they provide 115,000 outpatient consultations and over 20,000 planned operations or other planned procedures every year.
While acute and specialist children’s services will continue to be provided from their current locations across both Trusts’ sites, they are due to be managed through a single, unified leadership structure from 1 April 2022. We will continue to work through longer term impacts for our wider divisional management structures though there will be one other structural change on 1 April - to ensure we maintain the most sensible grouping of services we will keep our neonatal service within the remaining directorate, managed for now within the gynaecology directorate.
