Ex-DH boss to chair troubled acute trust

A former national finance and performance boss has been selected to chair Liverpool’s troubled acute trust.

David Flory’s stint at Liverpool University Hospitals Foundation Trust for 12 months follows the blocking of incumbent Sue Musson’s reappointment by national leaders.

LUH sits within the recovery support programme, the successor regime to special measures, and NHS England oversaw the appointment.

Mr Flory will start in post at the end of February, and continue in his current role as chair of Lancashire and South Cumbria Integrated Care System.

He is a former director general at the Department of Health, responsible for NHS finances, performance and operations, and has a reputation for gripping these issues strongly in local organisations.

Last year, an external review flagged various issues around financial governance at LUH, saying the underlying financial deficit had deteriorated by £73m since it was formed three years ago, which was largely due to a “substantial increase in the trust’s recurrent cost base during the pandemic, with no clear plan on existing costs which were funded through non-recurrent income”.

It found whole-time equivalent staff had increased by 960, which was “not proportionate to changes in activity volumes or bed occupancy over the same period, and only a small amount of the cost growth is evidenced in business cases”.

Mr Flory led several health bodies in the North East before moving into national roles. After working at the DH and as deputy chief executive of the NHS, he was made CEO of the former Trust Development Authority in 2012 to 2015.

The TDA was one of the organisations criticised by the review into the Liverpool Community Health Trust scandal, which happened between 2010 and 2014.

In 2015, Mr Flory took a job leading a hospital group in Qatar, from which he returned in 2020. He was briefly the interim chair of Cheshire and Mersey ICS, before it became a statutory body.