Chief AHP's blog
Date of release: 30 November 2023
Spotlight on Our New Deputy Chief AHP
by Ros Leslie
For my blog this month, I want to turn the spotlight on Charlotte Colesby, who I was delighted to appoint as our new interim Deputy Chief Allied Health Professional (AHP) until March 2024.
During her secondment, Charlotte will be responsible for supporting the strategic leadership and delivery of the AHP workforce programme across The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust (RWT).
She will be working in the context of national policy, including AHPs Deliver, the NHS Long Term Plan, the NHS People Plan and Integrated Care System (ICS) People Strategy. She will also provide professional support to two new Chief AHP Fellows.
Charlotte has recently completed a secondment working on the operationalisation of the Quality Framework for the RWT AHPs and has really enjoyed working strategically with AHP Leads, RWT Nursing and Quality Teams.
She has also enjoyed liaising with key teams at Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust and looks forward to extending this strategic work.
“This is an incredible opportunity to support the amazing work AHPs are doing across RWT and extending the voice of our AHP workforce here,” said Charlotte. “My secondment is for one day per week for six months and I intend to make every day count.”
In her three weeks in post so far, Charlotte has started supporting me across a range of workstreams, including developing clarity and focus for the Chief AHP Fellow roles, producing policy documents, scrutinising data and attending meetings to represent AHPs to ensure our voice is heard.
Continuing to work on the quality agenda, her appointment has been welcomed by the Nursing Quality leads with whom she plans to continue to meet and take forward other aspects of the quality work that she started during her previous secondment.
Charlotte has worked at RWT for six years as the Services Manager for Speech and Language Therapy (SLT). In this role she has transformed service delivery, grown the workforce, developed service structure, introduced bottom-up service planning, ensured robust SLT data and moved the service to electronic records as part of the service’s digital transformation.
Prior to this she has worked across the Black Country since she qualified in 1991. She is actively involved with the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and was recently invited to join them at Parliament where she was able to speak with both an MP and a peer about SLT challenges.
She is proud to be a Speech and Language Therapist, an AHP and an NHS employee and I welcome the chance to work more closely with her during her secondment.
Take care,
Ros
