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Developing leadership and management skills

Recommendations 65 - 68, 77

Recommendation 65

Recommendation 65

An early priority for the new NHS Leadership Centre should be to offer guidelines as to the leadership styles and practices that are acceptable and to be encouraged within the NHS, and those which are not.

Recommendation 66

Recommendation 66

Steps should be taken to identify and train those within the NHS who have the potential to exercise leadership. There needs to be sustained investment in developing leadership skills at all levels in the NHS.

Recommendation 67

Recommendation 67

The NHSs investment in developing and funding programmes in leadership skills should be focused on supporting joint education and multi-professional training, open to nurses, doctors, managers and other healthcare professionals. Recommendation 68 The NHS Leadership Centre should be involved in all stages of the education, training and continuing development of all healthcare professionals.

Recommendation 68

Recommendation 68

The NHS Leadership Centre should be involved in all stages of the education, training and continuing development of all healthcare professionals.

Recommendation 77

Recommendation 77

Universities should develop closer links between medical and nursing schools and centres for education and training in health service and public sector management, with a view to enabling all healthcare professionals to learn about management.

6.2 As the Kennedy Report indicates, the approach to developing leadership and management skills, particularly for health professionals, has been patchy in the past. Many health professionals have taken on senior management roles with little training or induction: non-executives have been appointed to NHS Trust boards without a clear understanding of their role; and senior managers have not always had the support and development that they needed to take on the challenge of leading major health care institutions.

6.3 Health organisations need to embrace the concept of leadership. This includes:

  • leadership from the top;
  • empowerment of staff;
  • team work;
  • prevention, rather than correction of adverse outcomes;
  • analysing, simplifying and improving processes;
  • commitment to encouraging clinicians into management;
  • ensuring greater involvement of women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds in management; and
  • a strong patient focus.

This leadership must be provided both by managers at all levels of the organisation, by clinical leaders and by non-executive directors.

6.4 A high quality modern health service needs high quality leaders to provide the vision and values to the organisation; to provide staff with a common and consistent purpose and clear expectations; and to create an environment and ethos which allows the development of an open and honest culture. Without the right leadership we will not make the progress we need to deliver the modern NHS to which we are committed. It is for this reason that we have established the NHS Leadership Centre as part of the NHS Modernisation Agency to develop and support the leaders we need and to build on the leadership capacity we already have. The NHS Leadership Centre will integrate its activities with those of the NHSU.

6.5 Actions already in hand by the NHS Leadership Centre are:

  • the development of a values and behaviours framework - local leadership programmes will be designed around it;
  • coaching and mentoring for senior staff in the NHS; and
  • a new executive director development programme focusing on multi-professional roles and responsibilities. This will bring together medical and nursing directors with colleagues from general management and finance.

6.6 The NHS Leadership Centre will also work with those involved in the education, training and continuing development of health care professionals and with the NHSU to ensure a coherent approach to the development of leadership skills in the NHS.

6.7 Creating truly effective leadership demands a more systematic approach to creating the leaders and managers of the future. We know that education and training programmes are not enough: we know that people need to be given the time to do the job and support to learn and develop the role. Developing leaders means supporting leaders at all levels in the service and across all disciplines. Increasingly many health care professionals will at some time in their career hold formal management roles. Where clinicians take on management roles there needs to be careful consideration of the relationship between clinical and managerial career paths.

6.8 We are working with the NHS Leadership Centre on setting up a national system of succession planning for and development of senior NHS and Department of Health staff. The brief extends to looking at work carried out by other large organisations and identifying best practice.

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