WORKFORCE, TRAINING & LEADERSHIP XXXX
‘Don’t rubbish doctors for not always acting like managers’
Peter Lees, medical director and former founding director of the intercollegiate UK Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management, gives NHE his thoughts on medical engagement and developing leaders within the NHS. David Stevenson reports.
part of any NHS organisation’s culture, but that time is needed in order to evolve this and doctors must be motivated to take on greater responsibility.
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NHE covered that in detail in our previous edition, but we wanted to catch up with Peter Lees, medical director at the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management (FMLM), to get his thoughts too on just how important it is to develop leaders within the NHS via medical engagement.
“The fact that you are asking the question defines the problem really,” he said, adding that it is “ludicrous” to imagine that the health service could function without engaging with an important part of its core: doctors.
Lees added that it is not all just about engaging with doctors on this topic, but “if you have a health service without engaged doctors you are going to be stuck”.
He stated that there is evidence from Michael West, who wrote one of the complementary reports for the King’s Fund, illustrating that ensuring doctors are engaged can help deliver high-quality, compassionate care (see box out).
26 | national health executive Sep/Oct 14
he King’s Fund recently highlighted that medical engagement should be an integral
Lees added that medical engagement is “incredibly” important, because it is good human resources practice with the major beneficiaries of this being the patients.
Encouraging engagement
The FMLM medical director stated that to encourage medical engagement, people really need to recognise it and work towards developing it. “We really need to mean it,” he said.
Stimulating medical engagement is easier said than done, he said, but is an absolute necessity nonetheless.
“We employ doctors to work in very complex environments, we train them in highly analytical skills so they can recognise patterns and not just take the patient coming in at face value – because if you take a patient at face value then you may miss actually what is really going on and the person who suffers then is the patient,” said Lees. “So we should not be surprised that the doctors have a particular persona, and behave in a particular way, and we certainly shouldn’t rubbish them for it.
“A lot of what people dislike about doctors is them applying the skills for which they were trained and employed to looking at other
problems within the system.
“A caveat to that is that doctors have got to learn to be able to operate in all sorts of different environments, so when it comes to management decisions – and you actually pragmatically have got to make a decision – then endlessly pontificating doesn’t necessarily help the system.
“The system has got to ‘understand the animal’ and understand the value that doctors bring to the system at a clinical level; and doctors have got to understand to flex that style when they are facing different things, like leadership and management of the whole system.”
Funding engagement
In order to develop future leaders, NHE asked whether funding was an issue. Lees told us that, yes, NHS money is tight. However, he also stated that if we want to get out of this situation and deliver some clever solutions then, actually, engaging with some of the cleverest people in the system would be a good idea.
“If you were sitting in the private sector and you had this bunch of people who were pretty bright but, because you find them difficult to manage and difficult to understand, you ostracise them, your board might look at you and think you are
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