A Christmas message from our chief executive, Andrew Corbett-Nolan
20 December 2021
The winter holiday is a celestial celebration that encourages us to reflect on where we’ve come from, enabling us to gain insight into what the future might bring. For as long as people have gathered at this time of year, they have lit fires against the night sky – to cast light on the year ahead, to celebrate the lengthening of the days, to anticipate better times.
Here at GGI, our focus is on more earthly systems, as we support our NHS clients – already under such extraordinary pressure from the COVID-19 pandemic – in their preparations for the shift to integrated care.
This year we ran another series of 100 briefings (called Illuminations), expanded our repertoire of events and held our seventh annual Festival of Governance, during which Sir Michael Marmot accepted this year’s Good Governance Award. We also staged the first Rising Star in Nursing Award, in honour of our much-missed friend Julie Bolus.
The immediate concern for much of the world and especially here in the UK is the rising emergency of the Omicron variant, which is outpacing the capacity of public services to fight it. It feels very much like a repeat of 2020, when the regular cycle of sustained governance needed to make way for speedy governance that enabled leaders to cope with the crisis.
Our Covid 100 series of up-to-the-minute practical advice remains as useful now as it was then. And our regular NHS NED development webinars not only empower individual organisations but also share learnings and concerns across the national system.
GGI’s universe has continued to expand in 2021. Over the past 12 months, the number of organisations we have worked with directly as clients increased by more than 20%, ranging from a local tenant organisation to a major London teaching hospital, from the new multi-billion-pound integrated care systems through to a leading county cricket club.
The ‘Great Conjunction’ of 2020 saw Jupiter and Saturn coming together in the night sky for the first time in 800 years, to form a Christmas star. One of the positive outcomes of the pandemic has been the way it has brought together extraordinary people to do extraordinary things. We certainly hope to continue with this work, bringing together people, knowledge, experience and expertise, using good governance as an enabler.
But for now we want to thank you for your brilliance and wish you all a Merry Christmas, filled with peace and hope, until we meet again in 2022.
