How clinical leadership can ignite a hunger for change in health and care.
Fiona Chatten, Primary Care Development Lead, NHS North East and North Cumbria
In a health and care eco-system that is under existential pressures from multiple sources; maintaining a sense of mission and individual passion is a constant challenge.
When colleagues feel like multiple factors are stacked against them, it can lead to burn-out, and increased staff turnover. There is a constant risk that the health and care system will lose good, talented people; which in turn perpetuates long-standing capacity challenges, creating a negative cycle.
The North Cumbria challenge
North Cumbria is a beautiful, but geographically isolated region, presenting a big workforce challenge for NHS and social care providers.
We don’t have a significant transient workforce, meaning that if people do leave the service, these gaps in capacity are harder to fill than in other more urban locations.
The good news is however, that we do have many individuals in our system with an intrinsic hunger to create sustainable solutions.
Enabling the Innovators
In challenging circumstances, natural innovators rise their heads up and find opportunities to create solutions. They refuse to be content with a status quo where sub-optimal patient experience and outcomes can become normalised.
Understanding that the status quo is not an option, they recognise that when things are difficult, it can inspire new, better ways of working. Displaying a personal drive to do things better and a strong personal stoicism, they have no appetite to stand back from challenges. Instead, they step forward and propose and test new ways of working.
Due to our less transient workforce, most people live here in North Cumbria, work here, and understand that we have to make our system work for us. We have a personal and professional stake in making better ways of working happen. Innovators are those people with a natural aptitude for designing these new ways of working and delivering them. And crucially, they’re people that have a clearly defined link between their role as clinicians and their personal missions to improve the quality of care, and indeed life, for people in our region.
Here in North Cumbria, we try to turn our challenges into opportunities for change. We support natural innovators to thrive, resulting in pockets of best practice and new ways of working. This not only helps to solve some of difficult challenges we face, but also creates environment where inspired and enthusiastic people can flourish.
I believe that the role of clinical leadership is to create and enable an environment where such innovators have a voice to test and implement their ideas.
As leaders we play a pivotal role in setting the tone, and constantly re-iterating the collective sense of vision or North Cumbria “to build a new integrated health and care system to create healthier and happier communities.”
The challenge we have as leaders is to model what works well in other regions, but to ensure that we can adapt that thinking to our own unique circumstances. And this is where being part of a national network of other clinical leaders is so transformational.
Community, Connection, and Growth
The NHS Clinical Leaders Network (CLN) is a peer community; where the sharing of challenges and solutions offers a constant source of fresh perspectives, inspiration and new opportunities.
By stepping outside our usual eco-systems, we learn, and develop together in safe spaces about how to become true catalysts for change in our own systems.
It is heartening and gratifying to see the hunger for change which is intrinsically part of natural innovators, reflected on a national scale through my involvement in the CLN.
The CLN provides the framework, the environment and the shared expertise to enable those innovators to thrive in an ever-more challenging environment in health and care. It’s why I and other clinical leaders embrace our involvement, and value the connections it enables.
We recognise together, that true innovation arises when challenges are embraced, and our people are empowered to make a difference. It’s this enablement and empowerment that will be key to delivering better care, and a sustainable workforce for the future.