CEO Review
"Our “iHEALTh strategy and strategic objectives, with a strong focus on innovation, human centred blood collections, excellence in all our internal processes, ensuring administrative rigour, best practice in logistics and testing, as well as a strong focus on our people has ensured that SANBS continues to perform well despite the external challenges, the most notable of which was the Covid-19 pandemic”.
Ravi Reddy
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
INTRODUCTION
Our CEO, Dr Jonathan Louw resigned in October 2020 and left SANBS at the end of December 2020. I was appointed as CEO by the SANBS Board and started in this position in January 2021.
I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to Dr Louw for his leadership during his 3 years at SANBS. He certainly ensured that we increased our focus on external stakeholders, service delivery and increasing our donor base. He was also instrumental in ensuring that we developed a robust and achievable 5 year strategy for SANBS. The resulting iHEALTh strategy and strategic objectives, with a strong focus on innovation, human centred blood collections, excellence in all our internal processes, ensuring administrative rigour, best practice in logistics and testing, as well as a strong focus on our people has ensured that SANBS continues to perform well despite the external challenges, the most notable of which was the Covid-19 pandemic. Our Medical Director, Dr Jackie Thomson, also left SANBS in March 2021 and I would like thank her for her immense contribution to SANBS, especially in strengthening the Medical Department and implementing many innovative projects.
We also bid farewell to our Chairman of the SANBS Board, Ms Getty Simelane, in January 2021 as she had served the maximum of 9 years on the SANBS Board. Her leadership and support of the Executive committee is sincerely appreciated and on behalf of the SANBS Board, Executive Committee, staff and Donors, we salute her for the role she played in steering SANBS through some challenging times and for her commitment to blood donation.
My personal journey started with Natal Blood Transfusion Service (NBTS) in April 1985 when I was employed as a trainee Blood Transfusion Technician to work at the King Edward VIII Hospital Blood Bank. I was fortunate to be offered many opportunities to study as well as spend 3 months working in various laboratories overseas. My career progressed and I was appointed as Head of Operations of NBTS in 1999. When the Blood Services merged in 2001 to form SANBS, I was appointed to the SANBS Executive Committee as Technical Director and assumed the position of Chief Operations Officer in 2006 and served in this position until I became CEO in 2021. I will be forever be grateful for the opportunities afforded to me by the many leaders I reported to and commit that I will do my very best to ensure that SANBS continues to excel as a leader nationally, regionally and globally.
Operating Context
The President of South Africa declared a level 5 lockdown, in late March 2020, to try and minimise the spread of the SARS CoV2 virus and contain the Covid-19 pandemic. This had a dramatic and immediate impact on the various commercial sectors in South Africa and SANBS was no exception. We had very limited time to drastically change the way we operated. Our access to collect blood from businesses, schools and communities was severely curtailed and in a very short time, we had to change our operating model to focus on channelling our donors to our fixed site Donor Centres that were permitted to operate as essential services. This entailed communicating to all donors via electronic channels, arranging permits for donors to travel and re-organising workflows to adhere to social distancing protocols. I must compliment our regular donors who continued to donate despite all the uncertainties. Even though donations from our first time donors reduced from 15% to 7%, we still managed to collect sufficient blood to meet the demand, which declined slightly, due to limited elective hospital admissions for surgeries, as a result of prioritised Covid-19 patients.
Given the strong research capacity built up over the last decade, SANBS played a significant role in many Covid-19 related projects and research collaborations. These included:
From a people and operational perspective we had to adapt and make many changes in the 1st quarter of the year. These included the implementation of remote working for employees to work from home. Despite some initial concerns, I am happy to report that this has worked very well and productivity and deliverables have remained high. A negative aspect was that the opportunities for face-to-face interactions was severely limited. We have implemented a remote working policy and also assisted staff by providing office furniture. The Executive Committee continued to monitor and review certain targets for blood usage, revenue, expenses and blood collection as a result of the changes in operations and blood demand, especially during the 1st few months of lockdown. SANBS staff certainly showed resilience, and at the end of the financial year we managed to achieve exceptional results on the iHEALTh metrics.
Changes to the Board and Exco resulted in the appointment of Ms Ansie Ramalho as Chairman of the SANBS Board, Manickavallie Vaithilingum, Shauket Fakie, Thabo Mokgatlha as non-executive directors and Dr Karin Van Den Berg as Medical Director (executive).
Additionally we embarked on an extensive evaluation of our current operating model, especially in operations, and one of the tasks was to determine whether the scope of the COO role was too large and whether this may need to be split into Donor and Technical Executive positions. The Marketing Executive role was also included in the exercise. The outcome of the investigation was a recommendation to appoint two Executives (Donor and Technical Operations) to replace the vacant COO position. Additionally, the marketing function will report to the Donor Executive. The new positions will be filled in the 2021/2022 financial year.
Highlights for 2020/2021
Key highlights for 2020/2021 include:
Financial Highlights
The financial year 2020/2021 must rate as one of the most difficult years to manage budgets, revenue and expenses, given the different levels of lockdown, the 1st and 2nd waves of Covid-19 impacting severely on availability of hospital beds and the changes that had to be made to staffing and operating models. SANBS monitored the blood demand, revenue, expenses and blood collections very closely during the first 3 months and prepared a revised forecast for the financial year based on the 3 months data as well as projections from experts on the impact of Covid-19 for the rest of the year. A moratorium was placed on the appointment of permanent staff and a number of positions were filled with fixed term contract staff.
Despite all the challenges, the SANBS team managed to keep expenses to R28.4m below forecast and generated a healthy surplus of R210.5m (6.6% of revenue). This will ensure that we can continue with many of the capital intensive projects in 2022/2023. Our cash reserves atR1.8bn remain within the target of 6 months reserves in order to ensure sustainability of operations in the event that payment is delayed by our customers.
Sustainability Highlights
A key focus continues to be our Greening strategy and projects. We have achieved a 5 Star rating from the Green Building Council of South Africa for our SANBS buildings in Mt Edgecombe. Solar panels were installed in Mt Edgecombe to minimise dependence on coal generated electricity and the borehole water supply system has been recommissioned to minimise municipal water usage. We continue to monitor and reduce our carbon footprint in various areas including travel, waste generation and electricity usage. The Mt Edgecombe campus will be utilised to attract and retain donors through the Journey of Blood experience thus ensuring long term sustainability of our donor base.
Another focus is to ensure that we are constantly improving our infrastructure to ensure optimal service delivery with minimal disruption. Some key projects in this regard following our successful completion of the Mt Edgecombe project, include upgrading of our buildings and laboratories in Constantia Kloof, refurbishing of our blood banks and donor centres, upgrading of our IT systems (both the laboratory and SAP systems) to ensure long term security, efficiency and sustainability.
We have achieved a level 5 BBBEE rating and will continue with our transformation journey ensuring that we use previously disadvantaged suppliers, employ competent staff while ensuring that our employment equity targets are met, employ staff with disabilities and provide learnerships to give some unemployed South African youth an opportunity to acquire skills.
We have been successful in implementing our iHEALTh strategy and this will continue to be a strong focus to ensure that the strategic projects are completed on time and within budgets thus further improving sustainability.
Our People and Culture
As CEO, I have impressed on the Leadership that continuous development and empowerment of staff is a key contributor to SANBS’s current and long term success and our focus must be on leading our staff. Our Learning and Development team implemented various online programmes during the financial year to engage with staff and foster ongoing learning. In 2020/2021, approximately 200 staff were offered the opportunity to enrol with Wits University and study one of the many online programmes being offered. This has proved extremely successful with the completion and pass rate being greater than 95%. Despite the challenges of minimal face to face interactions to discuss our DNA metrics, we still achieved a 10% improvement in our DNA score compared to the previous year.Over 500 of our leadership have participated in the 360 degree assessments and SANBS, with assistance from our service provider, have analysed the results. The next round of assessments will focus on individuals that scored low in the assessments to assess how improvement is being achieved after the implementation of development initiatives for these individuals.
The Leadership tasked with the operational implementation of Research and Development Academy, have had success with the implementation of numerous training initiatives, research collaborations, development of research capacity among staff and organising of learning cafes and webinars. We have approved the Succession Planning policy and procedures and will implement various initiatives in this regard with the ultimate target to employ at least 70% of middle and senior leaders from internal staff.
Outlook/Looking Ahead
Some of the key projects looking ahead are :
Conclusion and Appreciation
In what must rate as one of the most difficult years in SANBS’s 20 year history, it would be remiss of me if I do not thank and appreciate our staff and donors. Our frontline staff are the unsung heroes and heroines. The year started with us going into level 5 lockdown with Covid-19 starting to spread in South Africa and very little known about its impact on individuals. Despite this predicament our staff continued to report for duty, potentially exposing themselves to increased risk, despite all the precautions being taken. I must also acknowledge our Exco team and leadership who worked tirelessly to ensure that we could change our operating models, have sufficient PPE’s for all staff and ensure the necessary equipment was provided for staff to work remotely. All of our support staff must also be thanked and acknowledged for adapting quickly to a changed work environment and continuing to deliver.
Additionally, our regular donors must be acknowledged and thanked as they also reacted positively to our calls for blood donations and despite the inconvenience, they continued to visit our Donor Centres, despite concerns they must have had for their personal safety. Many suppliers were also happy to bring in additional consumables at short notice to mitigate against stock outs.
The SANBS Board members played a pivotal role in leading SANBS and guiding Exco and their commitment and leadership is sincerely appreciated. I would also like to thank all our external stakeholders for their continued support.