COVER FEATURE


Staff at the Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital in Cramlington


“This is all about bringing back to staff the understanding that, for you, this is just another day at work, but for that woman, this experience is going to stay with her for life. The work has helped us make many improvements, but most importantly it has helped everybody to see women as a whole person, not just the diagnosis or condition.”


Investing in leadership Recognising and replicating leadership success is one thing, but creating it from scratch is another. This was the challenge facing the newly formed Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust in 1998. Serving half a million people, and covering a 2,500m2


area that stretches from North


Tyneside to the Scottish Border and from the Pennines to the East Coast, the Trust lacked standardised processes and governance, and its teams were disparate. David Evans, a Consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist and now Medical Director at the Trust, was in the vanguard of Northumbria’s training programme when its three district general hospitals and six community hospitals were brought together. “We started from the unusual position of


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adversity, so we knew we had to rise out of the chaos quickly,” says David. “The then- CEO knew that it should be a clinically led Trust and that we needed to train a lot of clinicians.”


At the same time, David had been part of an exchange programme organised by the Department of Health. After observing the practices of a care consortium in California called Kaiser Permanente, he quickly realised the value in developing clinical leaders. David explains, “Kaiser acknowledged the phases of a consultant’s career, supported them and trained them to take on leadership and management roles, across all clinical groups. It worked very well for them in what is a very hard-nosed healthcare environment.”


It was clear that the Trust’s future lay in its people and their ability to bring about change as quickly and painlessly as possible.


Keeping it simple Northumbria’s in-house Leadership Development course helps participants to understand personality types, deepens their understanding of the organisation and the


It’s not only the staff at the Trust who benefit from the programme. Northumbria was recently named as one of only three organisations selected by NHS CEO Simon Stevens to develop new ways of working known as ‘multi- hospital chains’.


O&G November 2015


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