Clinical leadership

06/15/10 • 14 min

Cambridge Judge Business School Discussions on Health Management

The recent Darzi report recommends an increase in clinical leadership in the NHS. Whilst Professor Stefan Scholtes believes it is important to have more clinicians on the board, he cautions that this approach needs to be thoughtfully implemented; "haven't we been here before during the first fifty years of the last century when hospitals and organisations were lead by clinicians... we ended up bringing in managers as the clinicians couldn't organise the finances". Professor Scholtes argues that the key is to motivate clinicians to want to become managers, and to then train them up, equipping them with the necessary managerial skills to make economically sensible decisions about the distributions of resources. Their deep-seated professional perspective combined with an over-arching view of the 'system' will lead to innovations in the services and even greater beneficial efficiencies in the future.

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Public sector pay freezes

Dr Jenny Dean says NHS managers may well have to bite the bullet and accept a pay freeze in the coming year, but if it is executed in the right way and shown to benefit the NHS it may not demotivate staff. The right leadership is key to implementing such top down decisions that directly impact on people's pay, lifestyles and pensions, she says, but if NHS leaders engage with managers to make them see the longer term benefits it will make any freeze easier to shoulder.

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Leading change

Professor Dame Sandra Dawson led a team of consultants who advised the Department of Health on the establishment of their recently announced National Leadership Council, which has been designed to champion leadership in the NHS as it enters a new stage of reform. She explains that in order to achieve true transformational change, leadership for large and diverse organisations needs to encourage, guide and support development from the grassroots up through the use of leadership pipelines and mentoring.