The emerging leaders in Primary Care Programme has been designed to equip staff with the knowledge, skills and expertise to develop into locality- and system-level leadership positions in primary care. It has been designed with the specific needs of commissioning partners in mind, and uses expertise and learning from similar programmes run by UCLPartners and their delivery partners. UCLPartners’ Emerging Leaders in Primary Care Programme has been awarded the Royal College of General Practitioners Accreditation Quality Mark.

Audience
Aimed at developing the next cadre of CCG Board Members, the course was open to GP Partners, Practice Nurses and Practice/Business Managers.

Aims
• Raise participants’ self- awareness with respect to their strengths and weaknesses as leaders in primary care
• Encourage participants to develop greater awareness of others whom they interact with in their workplace
• Promote greater understanding of current issues within the NHS at local and wider system levels

Structure
•Is targeted at emerging leaders in primary care, embedded at locality or system level
•Combines evening and full day learning modules which have a bespoke design for specific challenges of primary care
•Includes 1:1 coaching and action learning sets, supporting every participant to deliver change management project within their locality or network

Delivery Partners
UCLPartners, Staff College, The Dartmouth Institute and Care City

Delivery of a three day leadership development module, ‘Awareness of Self and Impact on Others,’ and an evening module ‘Leading Change.’

Module: Awareness of Self and Impact on Others

Structure:
Three day course delivered in one day segments over a 2 month period.

Aim:
To become fully aware of how personal patterns, assumptions, strengths and weaknesses both help and hinder their performance as leaders.

Areas covered:

Day One
• Why awareness is so important – the primacy of relationships in a wicked world
• Becoming aware of personal patterns, assumptions and choices and their intended and unintended impact
• Understanding our ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ selves

Day Two
• Self in context – understanding the sense of personal leadership in a larger system
• Becoming more aware and increasing the responsibility for process (how you go about working) as well as content (what you work on)

Day Three
• Making a difference to my team – individually and collectively
• Using awareness to build resilience

Leading Change

Structure:
Two and a half hour evening workshop

Aim:
To help people ‘think clearly about change, so they can act clearly to change’

Areas covered:

• Understanding the entwined nature of change and persistence
• Avoiding a fixation of project management
• Working with resistance
• Taking an experimental stance
• The four types of improvement
• Communicating the need for change and influencing others

An independent evaluation report of the first two programmes has been conducted by Dr Yiannis Kyratsis, Senior Researcher at City University.

Increased self-knowledge, improved self-confidence, and changes in interpersonal behaviours and skills at the workplace were the most frequently cited types of outcomes by the participants.

The inductive analysis identified 12 first-level inductive themes which are clustered into six overarching themes that are linked to broad types of outcomes as follows:

1. Changes in personal and professional self-awareness (Self-reflection impact)

i. Self-awareness
ii. Improved learning strategies

2. Changes in skills and competences (Self-management impact)

iii. Improved administrative / management skills
iv. Self-composure competencies

3. Unlearning old habits and comfortable patterns of behaviour; observable changes in how participants act in various situations and settings and changes they might initiate (Behavioural impact)

v. Patterned actions and behaviours
vi. Leading in the GP Practice
vii. Leading in the Local care system

4. Changes in how participants view aspects of their work or personal life and how they understand the wider system (Perspective impact)

vii. Work philosophy
xi. Personal life

5. Changes in the amount, frequency and quality of interactions with others (Relational impact)

x. Relating to others
xi. Relationships with peers

6. Positive changes in how participants feel about themselves, their work and their elevated level of energy to initiate action (Affective impact)

xii. Positive Feelings

Importantly for possibly more sustained outcomes the trainees appeared to have developed strategies and competencies for continuous learning, including:

i. Improved self-awareness
ii. Reflective thinking
iii. Developmental learning through developing trustful relationships with their coaches or mentors
iv. Peer-mediated learning through regular interaction with their colleagues.