When Ben Gowland left the NHS to set up his own company he was publicly accused of immorality. He himself questioned whether he would be able to retain his public service values in the “outside” world. Here he reaches a conclusion.

Are people who work in the NHS more value-driven than those who work outside the NHS? This is a question that came quickly to mind when I decided to resign my role as Chief Executive of a CCG and establish my own company. When my decision to quit was announced in the local media, the message board on the Northampton Chronicle and Echo website erupted into life with furious comments condemning me as a villain and a leech. The tone is summed up by this one:

“Ben Gowland has no better morals than the bankers & corrupt politicians of late that we all have witnessed…When are politicians and the media going to wake up and expose these people? Their only desire is to milk us dry and take even more money for themselves…I wish every failure for him and his venture. He’s wrecked our services now he wants to set up a company supplying services back to us to cream off even more monies from the public purse!”

And this was one of the more moderate comments. I must admit to being surprised by the reaction. I wasn’t expecting a ticker-tape parade and dancing in the streets of Wellingborough when I left but, like anyone who has worked hard for a long time, I thought I might just leave with a warm glow and appreciation of a job well done. How naïve!

At the heart of my decision to leave the NHS had been a growing disillusionment with my ability to effect real change from within the Service, and a belief that the freedom of working for myself would make this more possible. Shifting from being paid directly by the NHS as a salaried employee to working alongside the NHS, contracting services in, didn’t feel like a decision to move to the “dark side”. But was it? Had I now become, as owner and only employee of a private company, a person lacking in morals as the comments suggested? Did my new position inevitably place me as a self-interested capitalist, no longer interested in social values?

I found even the suggestion that this might be true to be difficult. It took me several months before I could even read the comments written in the paper in full and they made me variously cringe and become indignant. Deep down I knew that, whatever others might think, I personally could add more social value from outside the NHS than from within it. I understood it was going to take time to prove this to others, particularly those who don’t know me but my whole career has been driven by my values – so prove it, I would.

I started by writing down the mission of Ockham Healthcare, and published it on the website. It finishes like this,

“Ockham Healthcare is here to create practical steps to a better future for healthcare: to support those who embody the ideas of the NHS but that the NHS seems to work against; to help those who want to create a new future for the values underpinning the NHS; and to enable change and innovation in a system without incentive to change.”

The opportunity I now have is to use my position outside of the NHS (and the freedom this brings) to provide help where I think it is needed most, and to focus on areas of my choosing -rather than those chosen by others. Now it is up to me to embrace that opportunity.

The whole experience has actually made me far clearer about my own personal values and about what I am trying to achieve with my life and my career; far clearer than I had been for many years operating within the NHS.

Can one enter the cut-throat world of commerce and remain value-driven? Using my experience as a sample of one, the answer is “yes”. Not only is it proving possible to be value-driven in the private sector I find that, by being single-minded about what I believe in and without the distracting influence of other agendas, my values have led my actions in Ockham Healthcare even more forcefully than when I was in the public sector. And long may that continue.