Sarah Sheppard

Sarah delivers human resources and organisational development functions to a variety of organisations. She has been involved in the development of commissioning support units from their inception – working with Staffordshire, Lancashire and Central Midlands CSUs prior to their merger and playing a key role in the way MLCSU has evolved. This makes her perfectly positioned to play a critical role in the future of the CSU, enabling it to support CCGs and other customers to deliver their own challenging objectives.

Sarah has been working in healthcare for more than 25 years. She previously worked as HR director in the acute sector for 10 years before becoming an independent consultant for a wide range of customers. She also has invaluable commercial experience.

Leading our people management strategy, Sarah ensures that the CSU is a great place to work and that staff are ideally placed to provide an excellent service to our customers. She has a detailed understanding of the CSU service portfolio and recognises that relationships are the key to our success. This drives development interventions and organisational design, which produces positive results for our customers.

Sarah ensures that everything we do is underpinned by our organisational values and everyone who works for the CSU feels valued and empowered to play their part in delivering the best possible care for patients. Staff engagement is a top priority and our staff survey scores have improved following a number of interventions and initiatives.

She has significant experience of developing performance management frameworks and embedding individual performance management into organisational effectiveness. In particular, she has carried out a number of reviews on performance, and impact assessments for individual services, which have released significant savings whilst improving service delivery at the same time.

To ensure that the CSU continues to develop to meet the changing needs of our customers, Sarah has developed a suite of information which provides both hard and soft intelligence on workforce dynamics. This influences our approach to recruitment and retention, absence management and staff management, and ensures that we are a cost-effective organisation with low absence rates and well-managed staff turnover.