Bill Maher is chief executive of the Bon Secours Health System, Ireland’s largest independent hospital group. Maher has extensive experience in the public sector, as former group chief executive for the RCSI Hospitals Group as well as group chief executive of SAOLTA, which he established as the first hospital group in Ireland. Bons Secours recently launched its latest five-year strategy, the Bon Secours Health System 2025 plan.
Healthcare is a dynamic environment. How difficult is it to plan ahead?
The new plan is building on our successful 2020 plan. We plan in five-year cycles and any more than five years is a bit fanciful because healthcare moves at such a fast pace now.
When I first wrote the 2020 plan we hadn’t heard of Brexit yet and Donald Trump wasn’t even a presidential candidate. We try to map out the challenges that face us as an organisation, as well as the opportunities to do more good. Our tagline is good health for those in need.
Can you tell us more about what the plan includes?
For our 2025 plan, we have designed this to have five strategic goals encompassing 15 strategic initiatives. The first goal is exceptional people, where we want to attract, develop and retain exceptional people dedicated to exceptional care, which is also our second goal. We are aiming to deliver exceptional care through a commitment to excellence and evidence-based practice, quality and safety.
Our third goal is operational efficiency and to that end we are developing shared services; for example, the Bons has five hospitals across the country so once upon a time we used to have five separate payroll systems and five separate accounts payable departments, but these have been centralised.
The fourth goal is sustainable growth. When I started back in the Bons group five years ago, our revenue was €282 million but last year it was €360 million, so there has been huge growth. In the next five years, we are going to bring that up to €450 million.
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Are there specific initiatives in the plan you would like to highlight?
Our last goal is staying true to our mission. We are over 100 years old so it is important to us to maintain our founding vision and values. There is a number of measures we are introducing in line with that including “The Good Health Fund”, where we will put aside half a million euro each year to fund various community initiatives, which will, in effect, provide free treatment to those on public waiting lists.
We have seen numbers hit over 900,000 so the private sector can play a strong role in helping to address this. The new strategic partnership between the public and private health sectors will make a huge difference – by working together we can ensure that nearly a million of our citizens aren’t left on a waiting list.
How do you foresee the Bons Secours Hospital Group evolving over the next five years?
In our strategy we outline where that growth will be. Some of it will be doing the same services but some of it will be introducing new services to each of our hospitals.
The biggest single one is that we plan to build a new hospital in Limerick. This will be the first new private hospital built in the State in the past 15 or 20 years and will help us meet demand. We are a charity so we can invest our funds back into our network.
A big part of the new Bons Secours strategy is identifying where we can partner with the HSE and the Department of Health, as we did so successfully in meeting the needs of the coronavirus pandemic, and I think the new strategic partnership will be a game changer.
Future Health Summit takes place at Dublin's RDS on May 18th and 19th - futurehealthsummit.com