Don't apply here if you value your wellbeing and want to work in a meritocracy - Regional Programme Manager System C Employee Review

There are few people that I dislike enough to subject them to this horrific place. The culture was beyond toxic. It was unnecessarily stressful. Nepotism was rife and there were far too many senior managers who loved to talk and take no action. Leadership, if you can call it that, was totally haphazard and reactionary. Every single day was a constant challenge. If there was one thing they were excellent at, it was making the job far harder than it ever needed to be. Managers excelled at overcomplicating established tasks and processes to make them seem more important and justify their own positions. The SMT were full of their own self-importance and completely out of touch with reality. Staff morale was on the floor, yet just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it did. The ability to keep acquiring previously successful businesses and completely annihilate them in record time was impressive in a way. They couldn't care less about the customers or the employees. There is no meritocracy in place and your skills, experience and knowledge are meaningless. We lost irreplaceable knowledge and experience at a titanic-like rate and yet absolutely nothing was done to patch the holes. When I left there was a distinct lack of sector experience throughout the delivery team and recent recruitments were clear evidence that nothing was being done to rectify that. Evidence has proven time and again that you cannot effectively implement medicines management projects (or any digital healthcare projects for that matter) without subject matter expertise. The lack of support and transition planning that was on display to myself and to other members of the team who had already left was appalling. Our former line manager (who left 3 months before me) was without a doubt the most supportive and incredible leader that I've had the pleasure to work for. Her replacement was completely incompetent and totally unqualified for the role. The senior management decision to appoint them into a medicines management leadership role without any medicines management experience was disgraceful. Confidence and morale in the delivery team was at an all-time low and there have been further resignations since I left. The team wasn't being adequately supported or led and I found myself having to provide line-manager duties to other members of the team because they were actively seeking them from somebody else. In 3 months the team went from the most highly-performing, results-driven team in the company to one which was rudderless, haphazard, chaotic and ill-equipped to run the programme. The SMT, and those they have inserted into inappropriate roles for the which they are entirely unqualified, have no interest in hearing the opinions of the experienced and knowledgeable staff who could actually stem the tide and start to rectify the mistakes that were made over the 18 months since the acquisition. It had become so common for people to ask staff for opinions or help but then completely disregard the responses, or in many cases just to answer their own question. Internal comms was abysmal. Nobody believed in the strategy and goals that were being communicated. As a business we should have been customer-focused, ensuring that we delivered software that improved patient safety and helped clinicians and ancillary staff to deliver healthcare more effectively and efficiently. JAC was superb at this; it's one of the key reasons I left the NHS to join them. They respected their customers and were rewarded with incredibly high customer retention rates and customer satisfaction scores. This feeling has been completely eradicated. I have kept in touch with some customers since I left and have been told that "it's never been worse". Staff are very quick to notice when you don't practice what you preach. The words become meaningless if you consistently undermine them. We were told in December 2023 that benefits would be "harmonised" by 1st April 2023 for staff on legacy contracts. As April came and went there was no update on this topic, but never-ending updates on pointless 10,000 step challenges that real people couldn't care less about. They thought that this would humanise the senior managers and help improve the culture, but the reality was that it just alienated the average worker. One year after the restructure started, and still we had no private health insurance or life assurance. How much can the SMT really care about health and wellbeing when they reduced the paid sick leave policy from 3 months to 2 weeks (they did reverse that decision after receiving a huge backlash from staff). Perhaps they should have tried to support staff who were mentally scarred from the horrendously handled restructuring that they were unnecessarily put through. Perhaps they should have delivered on the promises that were made around benefits. Instead they treated staff and customers like an inconvenience and an afterthought. Updating the expenses policy to prevent staff from buying lunch or beverages whilst working away was the polar opposite of supporting our health and wellbeing. They actively prevented us from staying health whilst carrying out our remote role responsibilities. I regularly worked 4+ hours away from home for 2-3 days at a time, often having to fly to my customer sites. How they expected me to managed without expensing lunches and drinks during the day is beyond me. They were so out of touch and uncaring that it became laughable. I felt an enormous sense of pride and belonging at JAC/WellSky. It was like a second home. I consider many of those JAC colleagues to be genuine friends. We all believed in what we were doing, and we supported each other both in work and outside of it. I felt absolutely zero association with System C and am delighted to have left.