The Circle Academy
A programme for clinical leadership
Effective leadership in healthcare has become a key expectation of clinicians and non-clinicians. The societal and economic demands facing the health care industry require clinicians and managers to form productive and effective partnerships, facing these challenges together.
Inspired by our Medical Director - Massoud Fouladi, an influential proponent of clinical leadership - Circle is building The Circle Academy, a leadership programme for clinicians. It was piloted at the Nottingham Treatment Centre in October 2009 and widened to CircleBath in December 2009.
The Circle difference
There are already many medical leadership programmes and many more being developed. We differ from other programmes because of the following:
1. We are work-based: emphasising experiential
learning and reflective practice.
2. We use partnership: building on our in house
strengths and bring in external expertise
3. We are about participation: learning to
lead and learning in teams.
The Circle programme takes our existing practice into a curriculum that reflects our ethos of engagement and delivers measurable service improvement.
Circle explicitly aims to add value to our most important asset - our people. So that we understand our practice and our business, act from our understanding, and bring others with us on the leadership journey.
Our methodology
Using a blended approach of day events interspersed with short web-based seminars, we provide a bespoke programme to meet the needs of each team of Clinical Leaders and Senior Management. Each team effectively forms an academic cohort of about 20 persons.
In this way each cohort, as active partners, forms a learning community to realise measurable benefits for themselves and their organisations. In turn they also contribute to the further phase development of the programme.
Our results
Learning is applicable to day to day experience and continuous improvement. Our cohorts are benchmarked and effectiveness assessed in a mixture of ways against the learning outcomes. These are:
- Internal review boards which benchmark capability and measures of success which include improvements in service design and delivery.
- Clinician participation and engagement in the 'business of health'.
- Whole teams of managers and clinicians having a common language and shared understanding of the business of health care.
- Individuals have personal benchmarks established at induction regarding personal effectiveness in coaching skills, leading, co-producing, partnering. communication and time management.
- Cohorts peer-coach and review to assess effectiveness and continuous improvement measures of our value equation where Value = Patient Satisfaction + Clinical Outcomes / Lowest cost.
Finally we have been successful and continue to be successful in being awarded Royal College CPD accreditation for specific day events.
Our Challenges
As over 50% of each cohort consists of consultant partners, our greatest challenge is making best use of limited time.
We have been challenged to deliver this professional development in a bite-size format that enables mobile and distance learning. While technology such as Webex, Google Docs and Skype conferencing has enabled some elements of this, we are constantly seeking better and more effective technology platforms and considering such applications such as Sharepoint and video streaming.
The e-capture of our development sessions makes delivery scalable, building a resource that grows over time. Some day events are currently being scaled up to conference formats, where topics of learning and self-study have proven suitable for mass delivery.
The future
All of our participants would recommend the programs to colleagues. Circle ultimately plans to widen access to all health care providers - not simply those working directly with Circle. This ultimate goal would require a strategic partnering with a reputable academic partner.
To that aim we plan to test open conferences in a triangulated partnership between the organisation, leading business schools and royal colleges in the summer/autumn 2010.
