“I often say this is an admin job that got out of control,” Chris Withers jokes, describing his accidental route into NHS management. After training at drama school, Chris worked in theatre for many years doing production management and lighting design for plays, musicals and pantomimes. He worked on Maggie Smith’s last live play and partied with Eastenders actress Charlie Brooks. “It was a pretty great career, actually,” he says. “The wages didn’t increase much but I worked with people whom I greatly admired.”

Then the pandemic struck. The theatres went dark. Chris fell through the cracks of the government’s various support schemes. “I got to a point of desperation, applying for entry level admin jobs all over the place and getting nowhere,” he recalls. It was a shout-out on his socials that led to some temp work at Whittington Hospital in London, and a handbrake turn into NHS management. Six years later, Chris is a deputy general manager at Chelsea and Westminster, one of the highest rated hospital trusts in England.

Within months of joining the Whittington he was project managing the £2 million expansion of its endoscopy service to help tackle the post-Covid backlog. “I always saw it as a bit of a cliché that theatre folk have good, transferable skills, but they thought my background in production management meant I might be able to do this,” he recalls.

“Soft skills” picked up in his theatre career helped make up for his lack of “technical knowledge” of the NHS, Chris says. “I know how to get strong characters to do things on time. I liken it to going to a regional theatre in the middle of nowhere with a grumpy crew who don’t want to be out of bed, and having to get a full-blown show on by five o’clock.”

Despite the perception of the NHS as “very bloated, slow and inefficient” — “I’ve worked in three trusts now and there’s greater or lesser degrees of that in all of them”, he says – when the system has clear aims and proper funding, “things happen pretty quickly. As well as the pandemic, he points to the first rollout of community diagnostic centres. At the Whittington, he says, “the whole thing was done from start to finish in nine months.”

Chris moved into operational management, then to the Royal Free where he managed liver services for three years. In February, he joined Chelsea and Westminster, where he manages a range of specialist medical services across the trust’s two sites, as well as a cancer diagnostic service for non-specific symptoms.

While the Royal Free was “very challenged financially”, at Chelsea and Westminster challenge comes from “the high bar they’ve set for us” and “getting things done quickly enough”, Chris explains. “But I’m enjoying that a lot more than worrying about how the hell I’m going to meet this target with no resources.”

An Equity member in his theatre days, Chris first joined UNISON, then moved to MiP. “I’ve always believed in being a member of a union… but I thought it would be nicer to be part of a union that specifically represents what I’m doing,” he says.

After completing MiP’s reps training at the Royal Free, he joined the union’s National Committee, representing London, earlier this year. There can be “a lot of political dysfunction and factionalism” in union work “which I find frustrating”, he says. “But MiP’s committee is very mission focused. We raise different views on pretty much everything, but we talk things though and come to a consensus by the end.”

Chris is keen to boost MiP membership and activity in acute trusts, where the union’s presence isn’t as strong as in ICBs and system bodies. Trusts can still be “very hierarchical”, “workloads are intense” and “there’s definitely a slight cultural fear of putting your head above the parapet,” he says.

“I’ve observed that it only takes one senior person to have an unhealthy way of approaching things for that to filter through the system. Then there’s the pressure… The exec team are really on the details, so the minute something starts going off trajectory, they’re very much involved.”

A louder voice for trusts would also boost MiP’s campaigning work, he says, where he’d like the union to engage more with MPs and parliamentary committees, as well as ministers. “I think we see a lot of happens on the ground and how the national picture is affecting patients, both positively and negatively. So I think more of that voice would be useful.”/