COVER FEATURE


Leading the way to better health care


What does effective leadership and team working look like post-Francis and Kirkup? O&G speaks to two healthcare leaders who have taken very different approaches to transforming services for the benefit of patients and staff.


T


oday’s healthcare services face an array of unprecedented demands. Resource constraints and technological advances pose new challenges and, at the same time, higher expectations are redefining patient care. What’s needed from healthcare leaders and clinicians has rapidly evolved. This was brought into sharp focus in


February 2013, when Robert Francis QC published his findings on the failures at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust. Effective leadership lay at the heart of his recommendations:


“The NHS and all who work for it must adopt and demonstrate a shared culture in which the patient is the priority in everything done. This requires leadership at all levels, from ward to the top of the


12


Department of Health, committed to and capable of involving all staff with those values and standards.” Two years later, Dr Bill Kirkup’s report of the Morecambe Bay investigation reiterated Francis’ conclusion. Kirkup stated that a lack of strong clinical leadership at the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust led to the preventable deaths of mothers and babies. One year later, the King’s Fund argued


for the “need to move on from a concept of heroic leaders who turn around organisational performance, to seeing leadership as shared and distributed throughout the NHS.” Healthcare professionals were left in no doubt as to what needed to happen next – a radical move towards collective leadership.


The question for many now is, ‘how?’ This was the question Florence Wilcock, Divisional Director and Consultant Obstetrician at Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, asked when her Trust received very good results in the Care Quality Commission’s Maternity Services Survey 2013. Florence explains, “I became chair of the London Maternity Strategic Clinical Network’s (LSCN) maternity user experience sub-group in 2014. When deciding what to work on, we saw that many Trusts in London had poor patient survey results.


“Kingston was known as a friendly hospital and we knew we had good team working between disciplines, but we wanted to find out what it was we were doing right and how others could replicate that.” Partially inspired by interactions between healthcare professionals and women on social media sites such as Twitter, Florence wanted to “wake up the conversation”. “We felt that we needed to get everyone


O&G November 2015


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32