How We Work

We believe in clinical leadership. The simple idea that teams in a hospital are best led not by administrators, but by clinicians: people trained to put the patient's best interests first.

This idea has unusual power. It leads to empowerment of professionals, able to focus their decision-making on the people who matter most. In Circle hospitals and clinics, anyone - from a junior assistant to a senior consultant - has the right to question a process, propose improvements, and take those proposals forward. Look inside a Circle hospital, and you'll see a huge number of decisions being made "on the frontline" - without the endless escalation and administration common in healthcare.

This way of working has resulted in innovative like the Clinical Units model; professional development programmes like the Circle Academy; and of course the partnership structure itself.

Doing this isn't always easy. It means stepping back, giving people space, encouraging initiative and independent thinking. But it enables the right people to act - fast. And when they act, we support them in their decisions.

Accordingly, we treat healthcare as a professional service. It's not a product to be delivered by the numbers, but a consultative process that starts (and ends) with the patient. And that's how we work.