Governance Reviews

Why review your governance?

The demands on boards keep growing. Funding is harder to secure and harder to predict. Workforce pressures are acute. Demand for palliative and end of life care is rising. Boards are expected to hold all of this together while also satisfying the regulators, commissioners and supporters that the hospice is well led.

Trustees have a legal duty to manage their charity effectively. An external governance review is how a board stops and checks. It asks how well the board is really working, where the gaps are, and what needs to change. Done properly, it gives trustees evidence they can act on rather than impressions they can argue about.

The Charity Commission looks to the Charity Governance Code as the benchmark of good practice and echoes the Code’s recommendation that a Board gets an external review every three years or so.

For hospices there is another driver. The CQC's well-led question looks directly at leadership, culture and governance. A recent, evidenced external governance review is exactly the kind of assurance an inspection team wants to see.

What a review gives your board

• Assurance. Confidence that your governance is sound, and early sight of the places it is not.
• A shared picture. Trustees and executives often hold differing views about how well the board is functioning. A review surfaces that difference safely.
• A clear improvement plan. Not a report that sits in a drawer, but a prioritised set of actions the board can own.
• Credibility with regulators, commissioners and funders. Stakeholders of all kinds want to see evidence of your commitment to good governance. 
• A better use of trustee time. Boards that review themselves tend to spend less time on process and more on strategy.

David has undertaken more than forty hospices governance reviews in recent years. Added to his thirty years working in the sector, that means you get more than a report. You work with someone who understands the funding model, the regulatory environment and the particular pressures of running a hospice board.

Digi-Board: the diagnostic at the heart of our reviews

Our reviews start with Digi-Board, a structured online assessment completed by your trustees, chief executive and senior leadership team. It gives us, and you, hard data on how your governance is actually working before anyone sits down to discuss it.

Built on the Charity Governance Code, updated for 2025. Digi-Board is based around the CGC, with questions on each of the eight principles. There is no translating a generic corporate board assessment into charity language. You can also include optional sections on income generation, safeguarding, committee governance and CQC questions – all highly relevant to hospices. 

The questionnaire finishes with four overarching themes; Purpose and Mission, Governance, Reputation and Financial Sustainability, which together produce a single Overall Governance Rating.

Three levels of data, not just a score. Participants rate current performance, choose which improvements they would prioritise from a list based on CGC guidance, and add their own comments. You get the numbers, the direction of travel and the reasoning behind both.

Benchmark against more than 40 other hospices. Another benefit that sets Digi-Board apart. Your results are compared against two benchmarks: an All Charities benchmark, and a Hospice Benchmark built from the data of more than forty hospice governance reviews. This changes the conversation. Rather than asking "is 3.8 out of 5 on ethics and culture good enough?", your board can ask "why are we behind other hospices on this’’. Moreover, the improvement methods included in Digi-Board help provide the solutions. 

Anonymous, and therefore honest. All responses are anonymous. So, people tell you what they actually think - not what they think you want to hear.

Hard and soft governance. Digi-Board is not just a compliance check. It looks at culture, attitudes and strategic direction - where most governance problems actually live - as well as structures, policies and processes.

See where the board and the executive disagree. The perspective analysis compares results across stakeholder groups, showing you where trustees and the executive are aligned and where they are not. For many boards this is the single most useful page of the report.

Understand your board's make-up. The EDI benchmarking compares your board's demographics, covering age, gender, ethnicity, disability and length of service, against sector norms. It gives you an evidence base for succession planning and your next round of trustee recruitment.

Around an hour of each trustee's time. The questionnaire takes up to an hour and can be completed over several sittings, online, whenever suits. For a board of volunteers fitting governance around demanding day jobs, that matters.

It makes everything that follows sharper. The results tell us exactly which subjects are worth exploring in further elements. Nobody's time is spent establishing what a questionnaire could have told us in advance.

The cost of a Digi-Board Governance Review is £3,750 plus VAT. This includes two hours of virtual feedback and discussions on the results and recommendations. 

Should you wish, other elements of a governance review can be used alongside Digi-Board. This may include elements such an observation of meetings, a review of documentation or a skills audit. We can provide bespoke quotes for such projects.  

We facilitated a day at Wigan and Leigh Hospice to explore their respective roles and discuss the results of their Digi-Board Governance Review. 

As with most charities, two of their top chosen ways to improve performance in the Board Effectiveness dimension of Digi-Board were ‘Taking time to discuss how we work together, our individual motivations, behaviours and expectations’ and ‘Making time to get to know each other outside of meetings’. Such days represent an ideal chance to do both of these.  

‘It was very helpful to discuss the results of the governance review together. Similarly, to work together as Trustees and Directors to think how we would respond to fictional (but plausible) scenarios. We found the day thought provoking and refreshing.’  Jo Carby, CEO

'As the incoming Chair, I found Digi-Board a valuable and insightful tool. Our results were very positive, but the recommendations gave us a really helpful framework for further improvements to our practice and processes.’  Shaun O'Leary, Chair, St Wilfrid’s Hospice (Eastbourne)