E-LEARNING AND CPD
Penny Pereira, assistant director at The Health Foundation, discusses quality improvement and leadership development.
significant improvements in the quality of care delivered in their workplace and produce reflective writing about how their leadership style is developing. They also maintain a relationship with the Health Foundation following their fellowship to promote healthcare improvement.
I
n 2010 The Health Foundation launched a new leadership and quality improvement programme: GenerationQ. It aims to develop leaders who understand how complex health systems work and have the skills to inspire others to transform healthcare quality and bring about sustainable, system-wide change.
It grew out of our experience that quality improvement requires not just evidence- based and clinically meaningful improvement programmes but also skilled leaders who have a good theoretical knowledge of both hard quality improvement and the softer relationship skills need to foster innovation, risk taking and dissemination. GenerationQ offers just that. It is a fully-funded 18-month programme for senior leaders, including clinicians, that integrates
the
study of leadership, technical skills of quality improvement and the human skills that are at the heart of our people driven organisations. The programme is delivered in partnership with Ashridge Consulting and Unipart Expert Practices.
GenerationQ Fellows take part in an integrated set of activities including forums, workshops and
Taking part in GenerationQ is an exciting, challenging and life changing experience. As Janet Smallwood, Co-director of GenerationQ on behalf of Ashridge Consulting and Unipart, says: “GenerationQ is a great deal of work and it requires people to put their heads above the parapet and do things differently. It is not for the faint hearted.”
Interviews with some of the first cohort indicate how the experience has made them better leaders, better able to support quality improvement and better at relating to colleagues. They reported that the programme helped them in being more resilient to the challenges they faced in the NHS.
Tom Smerdon, general manager for Surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, joined the first GenerationQ cohort that completed in 2012. He explains some of
GenerationQ
“There is a risk in the NHS that we blame dysfunctional leadership for some of the difficulties around spreading quality improvement but we do not acknowledge the impact of the high level of uncertainty and anxiety in the system and what it does to our senior leaders.”
what he learned. “I don’t think I am alone in struggling with change programmes that do not deliver their expectations. You can have all the right things in place – a methodology, project plans and so on – but still find yourself in a place where unpredicted things happen and projects go adrift. So I came to GenerationQ from the point of view of having an interest in the way creative change occurs and how people and teams adapt to change and how that generates change in a chaotic way.”
one-to-one
coaching. Fellows are required to have support at executive level from their employer and to submit not just written assignments but also to lead
30 | national health executive Jul/Aug 12
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