Joanna Foster

Health and the Workplace: Improving Working Lives

Joanna Foster will explain how the NHS, the largest employer in Europe, is tackling the crucial issues of how to recruit, develop, motivate and retain its workforce.

Central to this is the challenge of how to maintain the health and wellbeing of staff as they cope with the non-stop stresses and pressures of a rapid change. Improving Working Lives is an ambitious national programme which pulls together other key human resource issues including diversity, work-life-balance, health and safety, training and development and in Joanna's hospital a lively Arts programme. All this is against the background of increasingly demanding targets for the delivery of health care and cutting costs. In Joanna's own hospital, as in many others, this programme is competing with a number of other major change initiatives.

Joanna Foster, CBE, Chair, the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, NHS Trust in Oxford, U.K. has held this position since November 2001. She is also on the Board of the Foundation of The Open University and is a member of the Advisory Board of Common. Joanna also has ten years experience of living and working internationally. In addition to working with the European Commission, she was a Faculty member with the INSEAD Business School in Fontainebleau, France. And, in the USA Joanna founded and directed a Corporate Centre at the University of Pittsburgh which offered change and stress management consultancy services to industry and the private sector. Joanna is an Hon. Fellow of St. Hilda's College, Oxford; a Visiting Professor at Bristol University and has a number of honorary doctorates.