Paul Assinder is one of the most experienced and respected Directors of Finance currently working in healthcare in the UK. He was elected as National President of the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) the leading professional body for finance staff working in UK healthcare, in December 2009. He is Director of Finance and Information and Deputy Chief Executive of Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, a large teaching hospital, providing acute healthcare in the industrial heartlands of England. His main role is the development and implementation of the business aspects of the Trust’s strategy. Paul has 30 years of experience in financial management and audit in large commercial and NHS organisations. With the last 21 years of his career at Finance Director level in both commissioning and provider arenas.
Paul has significant experience of Board level challenges and has specialised in the development of business cases and securing commercial funding for major building projects under the Private Financing Initiative. In particular, Paul led the negotiation and ‘banked the deal’ on a major PFI development at City Hospital Birmingham in 2002 and has recently renegotiated a major PFI deal and led the operational management phase, of the ground breaking Dudley Hospitals project.
Paul has an exemplary record of successful financial performance in every type of organisation throughout his NHS career and led his current organisation to foundation trust status in 2008. He has recently been selected to join the elite NHS Leaders Programme.
Whilst championing the highest financial management, audit and governance standards, Paul is also interested in developing clinical performance and accountability frameworks. He was an early pioneer of the NHS’s ‘Service Line Performance Management Initiative’, lecturing widely on the initiative in the UK for Monitor and other organisations.
Doubly qualified as an accountant (a Fellow of ACCA and a qualified member of CIPFA), with a University degree in Economics and Management, he trained and worked with Ernst & Young Co in the UK prior to moving into the Healthcare Sector in the late 1980s.
Paul has lectured and written widely on NHS finance matters generally. He is a member of a wide range of professional bodies and networks and is a Trustee of HFMA and a director of HFMA Ltd. Paul’s approach to NHS management seeks to embrace the best of commercial business practice with sound public service values. As such he retains a keen interest in the private business sector and is a Non Executive Director of the Birmingham Enterprise Agency, a Government sponsored regeneration agency facilitating new business start ups.
In 2006 Paul and his wife Debbie established the successful Rodborough Consultancy to provide high quality specialist healthcare financial consultancy support and business start up services to the private SME sector.