Blog - The Promise of Manager-Clinician Partnerships in the NHS

Andrew Wilson is a Senior Business Intelligence Analyst at AQuA. Following his visit to April’s International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare in London, he shares his thoughts on how the NHS needs to bridge the gap between clinicians and managers…

Andy Wilson

There were many fault lines that scarred society in 2016. Deep divisions between young and old, town and country, were evident across the social fabric of these shores throughout the last year. When we think back to the world of 2015, it feels more distant rather than a mere eighteen months ago.

Whilst there is no doubt that, like any other area of government, the process of leaving the European Union will have a significant impact on healthcare, the opening paragraph was not written with Brexit in mind.

Whilst Brexit will undoubtedly have an impact on the NHS, the focus of this blog is on junior doctors. In early 2016, the junior doctors’ strikes were leading news stories for several weeks. Strong opinions were held on both sides of the argument about the morality of the strikes, their impact on patients, the main protestations of junior doctors and who is responsible for this disagreement reaching this point.

Whichever side or viewpoint you took on the junior doctors’ strikes, I’m sure that you would agree that these are the clinicians who in five, ten or twenty years from now will be clinical leaders across the NHS.

Throw into the mix the pressure the NHS will be suffering over the next decade, a larger population with greater healthcare needs, you could be forgiven for thinking that the chasm between junior doctor and management of the NHS is not traversable.

Learning from Guy’s and St Thomas’ example

At the Quality Forum conference I was fortunate enough to attend a presentation by Joanne Ward (a deputy general manager) and Chris Meadows (a Critical Care Consultant) at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust.

Joanne spoke of how she felt it was critical that she spent more time in the clinical setting she was managing, to better understand the work the clinical team undertook, and their perspective of how the NHS functioned.

Chris told delegates of his experience as a new consultant, attempting to encourage his juniors to develop a better understanding of the work NHS managers do, and how the NHS functions. He also spoke about how their roles cross paths, and how the Trust had developed a programme to pair similar junior doctors and NHS managers, with the idea of letting them lead on a quality improvement project.

The programme consisted of a series of workshops and shadowing of roles to match managers and clinicians. The result of this was to have a formidable partnership that could engage with fellow clinicians to establish the underlying problem affecting patient care and work with managers to explore all options to achieve an improvement. Joanne and Chris also went on to talk about the various achievements of these partnerships had had at the Trust.

Hope for positive partnerships

So despite the picture of doom I painted earlier in this, I want to stress that here is just one (and I’m sure there are many more) tangible example of quality improvement working alongside the clinical leaders of tomorrow.

The gains in fostering more of these Manager-Clinician relationships are potentially massive in patient and experience terms, and there is a simplicity to their work financially too.

Link junior doctors with people who have the capability to change patient pathways, and you can achieve improved patient outcomes and a more engaged staff.