James Rooney Deputy Director of Transformation

About me

James is a GenerationQ Fellow and Deputy Director of Transformation at Devon Partnership NHS Trust.

Devon Partnership NHS Trust provides mental health and learning disability services across Devon.

James started his career in mental health and general nursing and he has more than 30 years’ experience in acute, primary care and mental health/learning disability organisations, in both the NHS and the private sector. He joined Devon Partnership NHS Trust in 2004 as Acting General Manager and took up the position of Deputy Director of Care in 2007.

In 2010, James was seconded to lead on the development of an integrated patient safety and quality improvement programme. This secondment evolved into his current role, which he has held since 2012.

James has a degree in management studies and a master’s in Public Sector Management/Policy. He has completed The King's Fund's Senior Manager Programme and the Patient Safety Executive Training Programme at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston.

James says that the fellowship has helped him to gain a better understanding of the breadth of approaches to quality improvement used by organisations internationally, and adopt them for use within his organisation. This helped the trust refine its training and development programme which now incorporates technical and non-technical skills training delivered in classrooms and in the workplace.

'We’ve set up a trust-wide Quality Improvement Academy to spread quality improvement knowledge and skills across a large number of employees. It builds on a training infrastructure that was already in place, but we’re expanding the team, formalising processes and working towards external accreditation for our courses. One of our goals is to build leadership capability at different levels of the organisation – we want to develop future leaders as well as support people who are already in senior positions.'

During GenerationQ, James completed the Lean programme at the Unipart Academy: 'Going into the fellowship, I believed that Lean processes could help us to manage demand and capacity much more effectively. And it’s already making a big impact – for example, through one programme of work, we’ve been able to cut waiting times across the trust by 48%.'

James says that GenerationQ has also helped him to create new dialogue with colleagues and frontline teams around quality improvement and safety: 'The nature and focus of our conversations have changed – people are well informed about quality improvement and increasingly interested in making it part of their agenda.'