Taking over as chief executive at Newcastle’s St Oswald’s Hospice is a big job at any time; doing so in the first weeks of the pandemic was very much a baptism of fire.
Steph Edusei was appointed to the post in February 2020 and still working the last weeks in her previous role when she received a call from the outgoing chief executive, to say that the hospice was facing probably the most significant challenge of its history. Two-and-a-half years on, services are returning to normal but still disrupted, and Steph has embraced the challenges thrown at her in the last few years.
She said: “I got a phone call from my predecessor saying: ‘Steph, we’re going to have to talk regularly because I’m going to have to make some decisions here that will affect your tenure as chief exec.’ All of the shops were closed, all of our events stopped, so other than some small amounts of statutory funding, we just didn’t have any money coming in. We didn’t know what was going to happen – we knew we could keep the lights on for a few months but that was about it.
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“On my first day, I came in and this place was virtually silent. I couldn’t go onto the adult ward; I couldn’t go into children’s or the day hospice. Our outpatient department was virtually empty, so were our offices. It was just so, so different from what I thought it would be.
“Whilst that made it really challenging in terms of getting to meet people and getting them to know me, in some other ways, it was really good because an organisation like St Oswald’s has been around for decades, it needed change and I came into an organisation where everything we did before had been thrown up into the air. I describe it as being like a tree rooted in concrete. What the pandemic did was like an earthquake that broke that up. So it was a lot easier to make change. The team knew we had to make change and they were ready for it. We had to do things differently but we could see ways to do things better.”
Steph grew up in High Heaton and was two years into a performing arts degree before dropping out and re-thinking her career. She got a job in the NHS, initially because it was where her mother worked.
“Within days I was absolutely hooked,” she said. “I’d gone from selling office furniture to real life-and-death stuff. They did transplantations, the stuff that we were doing really mattered. “Even the small role that I did typing up clinic letters and things like that was important. I spent the next 18-and-a-half years in the NHS, became a medical secretary and then joined the national management training scheme. I did a degree part time because I was determined I wanted to do it to get on and progress.”
Management roles in hospitals followed, followed by being assistant director of the North East Ambulance Service and the establishment of the Northumberland Clinical Commissioning Group. But after feeling she wasn’t progressing in her career, she moved into roles with health charities before getting the hospice job.
Despite her successful career, Steph said she was frequently beset by ‘imposter syndrome’, which led her to try to work longer and harder than colleagues, to the point of making herself unwell. The roots of those feelings of inadequacy, she said, came in part from being female and a person of colour when there few other examples of those in leadership positions. But though she knows she stands out, far from finding that a burden, she believes it is her “duty” to use her position to push for greater equality.
“So there is a gender thing and I think you find it very much amongst ethnically minoritized people because you do look different, you do stand out. You know that people will judge you. You’re not just representing you, you’re representing all of your people. I’m of mixed heritage, with a black father and a Geordie mother, so a white person wouldn’t say I’m white, but I have had some black people saying I’m not black. I didn’t belong to anywhere growing up, there wasn’t a lot of people who looked like me. That’s why I like being visible now for people of mixed heritage.
“There is a visibility now that wasn’t around in the ’70s and ’80s. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to do it but I do see it as a real duty. That whole thing of pushing for equity, pushing for inclusion – it’s just my job. It’s partly my job because I care about it but it’s part of my job because I am a woman and I am black. There are times when I think: ‘I don’t want to have to do this’ but then something will happen and, with my role and my profile, if I don’t say something, that would be saying a lot. I have to put my big girl pants on and go into battle. It’s unfortunate in a way but for me it’s something I couldn’t not do.”
As part of her activism, Steph set up the Black All Year initiative, an answer to Black History Month which aims to keep matters of racial equality on the agenda throughout the year. The challenges in her day job are not going away either, with the pandemic being followed by the cost-of-living crisis, both of which make it harder to fundraise, but also put more demand on services and increase costs for the hospice.
“We’re getting it on multiple fronts,” Steph said. “Our patients and families, it’s impacting on them. A lot of our patients have equipment that uses a lot of power, so we’re concerned for them and their wellbeing. Our staff are really feeling it and our budgets are really tight – staff is our biggest expenditure, so we’re trying our best to give them the salaries that will help them but we can’t match the kind of increases in prices we’re seeing. We’ve had staff that don’t want to leave but they’ve had to go to better paying jobs elsewhere. And we know that the companies and individuals who support us will be looking at their finances and trying to save money.”
But she added: “I want to make the organisation really brave and be able to try new things. We want to diversify our volunteers and our workforce but most of all to make sure that everyone out there knows that St Oswald’s is for them. We’re here for everybody and we want to really make a difference here.
“It’s been slow going because there’s been lots of fires to put out but I’ve been really excited to see how passionate the people here are.”
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