Interviewer

Good afternoon. Could I start by asking your name?

Richard Steventon

Richard Steventon.

Interviewer

And Richard, could I ask how old you are?

Richard Steventon

I’m 73.

Interviewer

And what League of Friends are we talking about today?

Richard Steventon

The League of Friends of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital.

Interviewer

Thank you. So Richard, have you always lived around here? Is this your home?

Richard Steventon

No  I am from The Potteries. I was born at Newcastle Infirmary, and then moved around the country. The first job I got was at Walsgrave Hospital, which I did for six months. And then I got very ambitious, and shot down to Devon and Exeter, and interestingly enough, it was a totally new type of post. I was recruited to work on an intensive care unit as a scientific support. Because there was so much technology coming that they wanted somebody to lean on to sort of get all the technology going. And so we did some amazing things down there. And then again, I got very promotional again. I always like to look for the nice places, York, Shrewsbury or coastal, stuff like that. And the job came up at Shrewsbury when this hospital was being built in 1979.

 

Richard Steventon

There was a post advertised for somebody to open a Cardio Respiratory Laboratory Service, supporting a physician. I thought, well, that’s much what I’ve been doing now. And I came up here, and worked for a consultant that most people around here know very well. Somebody called Dr. Bob Wilson. And he did things completely different. For example, he would have his consulting room, and my laboratory, two laboratories were next door, and he would just knock on my door, and say, “I’ve got this patient here, would you mind doing this test?” Whereas the traditional way when you came up here was that you’d have a consultation with a consultant, and he’d write a card, and need you to have an x-ray, you’d need to have your respiratory function test, and you’d have an ECG, and then the patient would go home. So he was sort of one of the pioneers of fast track on the same day.

Richard Steventon

And I enjoyed it so much. And then word got around where I had come from, Exeter Hospital, and one of the Urologists here heard about that, and said, “well, they’ve got a very good Urodynamics Unit at Exeter Hospital.” That was a lead. And he interviewed me, and said, “could you set up this service here?”  Well, I said, “I wasn’t involved with that, but I knew what was going on, and I could certainly help.”  So I ended up working for 10 years for the Urology Team as well, doing Urodynamic Measurements, and stuff like that. Then eventually I said, “there’s only one of me.” The work is just overwhelming. So as of today, there are now 29 similar technicians in this hospital. That’s how it’s grown because you’ve got Echocardiography, you’ve got EMGs, you’ve got all those measurements. And, you know, it’s just grown extraordinary.

Richard Steventon

And then in about 1990 again, I wanted more money. A job came up as Head of Clinical Engineering or Medical Engineering that’s known here. And I applied for it, and I got it, and I carried on with  Clinical Measurement for a bit. But that was too much for me to manage both. So a Chief Executive came in, and said, “I just want you to do the Medical Engineering full time.” And that’s what I did for the last 25 years or so. And that’s why I say when I retired, within a week, the QE heard I had retired and said, “could I do some consultancy work for them on their equipment management?”  And Jayne Mott said to me, “I want you on board for the League of Friends because you could sort the consultants out for their wishlist”.

Interviewer

Jayne had seen you working in a professional environment?

Richard Steventon

Yes, well, I put in bids because, you know, I would come to the Executive Board, and put in a bid. And I came with a consultant one day called Jeff Thompson, who again ran ITU here, and wanted to actually totally modernise all the patient monitoring equipment. And, correct me if I’m wrong, I think it was something like £200,000 he was asking for. And we walked away from the meeting,  myself and the

Anaesthetist, and another colleague, and the League of Friends agreed to fund it. And even today, that contribution has now just evolved. It’s embryonic of having patient monitoring everywhere.

Interviewer

So how long ago did you get involved with the Friends?

Richard Steventon

So within a week of retiring, Jayne had approached me and said, “would I join the Board?” In fact, I couldn’t formally join for about six months because you can’t vote until the AGM.

Interviewer

Is that 10 years ago?

Richard Steventon

It’ll be 13 years ago.

Richard Steventon

Yes, it’s my 13th year of retirement.

Interviewer

And so you’ve been involved in the League of Friends for 13 years. Has it changed much in the last 13 years?

Richard Steventon

Oh, it has. It’s changed slowly? Not dramatically. And it’s now going through some much faster change. For example, all the bids were big bids. So a consultant would come along to the Trustee meeting, and do a presentation, you know, on a screen, and things like that. And then there’d be discussions, and questions, and then the Board would discuss it afterwards. And then it would literally go into the Trust to say, we’ve approved it, hopefully. And then it took an awful long time for the Trust to actually sort out their approval process. Now, literally, because we’ve set up this new sub subcommittee for equipment, who are five people, all involved with equipment, we can make a decision by electronic means by using Zoom or talking to each other. And we just report back to the next available Board meeting, and say, “We’ve approved this, that, and the other.”

Richard Steventon

If it’s above 10,000 pounds, then we would expect a consultant, and in fact I just mentioned recently that over reducing the number of meetings we’ve got, that we don’t necessarily need to have them present. We could ask them to do a presentation, and send it to us electronically, and we can just play back ourselves, and make a decision because they know what questions that we would ask them, “have you got the trained staff? Is it approved by finance? Is it approved by the medical director, is it approved by all the necessary committees, medical devices committees?”  things like that. And decisions are being made up a lot more. So literally within two weeks of something being approved now it can be ordered.

Interviewer

So in 13 years, what roles have you held in the League of Friends?

Richard Steventon

I started off as just a Trustee on the Board for about five years. And then Ray Smith was Chairman, and he said to me, “Richard, I came here,  I did three years as Shops Chair. Would you do it?” I thought, well, I know nothing about shops.  But he was a very persuasive man. So I took on the Shops Chair and actually quite enjoyed that because that was interesting. And then near the end of that, the next chairman, he pushed me to do it because I was a bit reluctant to do it, and I did it, and I enjoyed that. So I did that for 12 months, and then went on for three years, because that’s our normal term.

Richard Steventon

And then we started this change of strategy, and I realised that nobody wanted to take on the Chair because of the burden of doing that. And I agreed to do it for an extra year. And so the Constitution was amended as part of our new strategy. And I did that for four years, and stepped down  in June this year. So things are moving a lot quicker. I think we’re getting better recognised by the staff in the hospital. And we just hope that the good work of moving the League of Friends to being more responsive and, you know, giving better value, supporting the Trust as much as possible.

Interviewer

So over the last 13 years, what’s the thing you are most proud of that you’ve achieved?

Richard Steventon

Possibly one of them will be the coordinating of getting three other Trusts, three other charities within the Trust combined. For example, about three years ago we had a bid for some AI software for Radiotherapy to, you know, assess the results from scans. And I approached Lingen Davies, and I said, “This has got a cancer theme, would you be interested?” And of course they jumped. And then also a lady called Julia Clarke heard about it. And we did that as a three-way split. So we were the last Trust in the West Midlands Cancer Network that hadn’t got this type of software. And we funded it three ways. And I thought this is significant because we’ve made our funds effectively go two thirds further than if we did it by ourselves. And so it was a great celebration when it happened. We all came to the same presentation, and some good publicity out of it. And since that it’s become the norm. We’ve done lots of three, if not two way splits, and not that much have we funded totally on ourselves. So we are getting better value for our money, and getting the Trust on board to work together with other Trust charities within the Trust.

Interviewer

Brilliant. And when you knew you were going to be speaking to me today, was there anything you wanted to tell me you haven’t had the chance to say yet?

Richard Steventon

No. Thank you.

Interviewer

And thank you for your time.