Cultivate leadership and improvement skills
Leadership reviews and research show the importance of fostering leadership capabilities within health and social care, linking it to patient mortality, quality of patient care and satisfaction and better staff wellbeing and morale. Every staff member whether in a formal or informal leadership role, plays a vital part in leading the provision of safe, high quality and person-centred healthcare. Collective leadership is based on the assumption that everyone can and should lead because the challenges that we face are so complex and no one person has all the answers. Organisations must continuously invest in leadership development, recognising that the best solutions come from collective expertise and shared responsibility.
Having a systematic approach to building capacity and capability for quality improvement has been identified as a feature of high performing organisations*. The Berwick review into patient safety (Department of Health and Social Care, 2013) stated that leadership should strive to create learning organisations and that quality improvement should be an integral part of continuing professional development. Quality Improvement is best defined as the combined and unceasing efforts of everyone to make changes that will lead to better patient outcomes (health), better system performance (care) and better professional development (learning)*. It is recognised that significant investment has already been made across Northern Ireland to enhance skills in improvement but there is still more to achieve. This was recognised in the Nursing and Midwifery Task Group project report ‘Nurses and Midwives in HSC Trusts QI Capability Baseline and Activity at December 2021’ (McCormick and Smith)* and the ‘Transfer of learning from QI training for better impact on care’ report 2018*.
Embed Collective Leadership across all areas
Empowering our staff as leaders, regardless of hierarchy, experience, location, discipline, creates a culture of collective working to ensure the best care, experience and outcomes for those who use our services and our staff. Our vision is one in which all nurses and midwives and AHPs strive for excellence and are enabled to be innovative improvement leaders. The NI Collective Leadership Strategy supported by the Collective Leadership Framework for Nursing and Midwifery provides a consistent approach to the development of collective leadership capabilities for professions working within the HSC system, regardless of roles. This strategy provides a structure and a tool that proposes actions and capabilities required to help build collective leadership talent across our wider HSC system.
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Strengthen opportunities for continuous quality improvement
Continuous quality improvement is an ongoing effort to improve all elements of an organization and rests on the belief that a steady stream of improvements, diligently executed, will have transformational results. Building enough capacity for improvement and learning requires organisations to have the associated capabilities among a sufficient number of their employees, at the right levels of the organisation. Leaders need to create a sustainable infrastructure that makes quality improvement an organizational priority and the accepted approach to daily work. Staff need to be developed and supported to think and act like improvers and have the ability to test, measure and learn from everything they do.
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