Our vision is to improve the quality of care and experience of those accessing health and social care services and the experience of staff providing them, through the development of better leaders.

Our mission is to develop better leaders with a strong moral compass who can contribute to developing a more caring, inclusive and responsible culture within health and social care.

And to use our influence to foster greater understanding of the need and benefits of developing better leaders, and the challenges to doing so.

We believe that leadership is an amalgam of emotional intelligence, courage, analytical skills and commitment, along with the resilience to rebound from setbacks and still be focused on the final objective. Our programmes have been developed to enable individuals to reconnect with their personal values and understand their own core motivations. They provide the opportunity for individuals to develop confidence in their own abilities and gain greater understanding of themselves and their behaviours. There is a particular emphasis placed on appreciating how their peers perceive them. Individuals are encouraged to consolidate and expand their leadership abilities through experiment by exposing them to a range of experiences and techniques.

We select faculty who have truly understood, experienced and been really tested in positions as leaders and who can inspire others to lead. The experience, quality and selection of faculty is fundamentally important to every successful Staff College intervention. We are committed to developing leaders from the health and care sector who are rooted in the community they serve.

We promote a leadership culture that delivers by doing and through example. The Staff College leaders will care passionately about developing their own leadership skills and, in equal measure, developing the leadership of their people, ‘the deeper you care the deeper your authority as a leader’. From the delivery of the highest quality of care flow recognition, self-esteem, and the highest levels of job satisfaction; the delivery of this requires courage and trust in full measure. The function of pulling together the efforts of so many well-intentioned individuals to achieve is leadership, and it is pulling not pushing.

This responsible leadership together with effective delegation will go a long way towards ensuring that healthcare services consistently deliver the best quality care for patients and communities. Our culture provides no easy or soft options; the same challenges and often conflicting priorities will still have to be addressed requiring honesty and courage from the leader in full measure. We are all human, mistakes will always be made and there is nothing easy about providing complex and demanding services.

On graduation, members are encouraged to maintain their connection with their peers for on-going mentoring and support. Members may also be invited to participate in the development of future courses so that their experience and credibility from working within the health service builds our shared capacity to deliver a cohort of self-aware health leaders with a strong cultural identity who can understand, decide, communicate, motivate and lead.