Excellence in Professional Education Programmes

Summary of work

The 2011 Royal College of Physicians (RCP) audit of the NHS’s performance in providing healthcare services to people with MS showed little improvement in care over the past few years. Many MS consultants responsible for leading services have found themselves leaders by default in a field that they feel passionate about. Improving patient services had to be at the heart of the training course rather than individual leadership aspirations. With increasing pressures on departments and organisational restructuring, PLaN was designed to support MS consultants in their goal of improving patient services. The PLaN Steering Committee identified core skills necessary to help MS consultants  meet service needs. Service visions include improving the patient journey; increasing the availability of resources; maximising team performance; identifying efficiency gains with limited resources; gaining stakeholder management and buy-in, PLaN helps MS consultants to achieve that vision. PLaN training was coordinated with Ashridge Business School trainers - a world leading business school - and a personal coach in Change Management. 100% of delegates have begun to implement their vision for service improvement; considered their personal leadership style and how to flex their style to ensure better functioning teams and improved MS services, following PLaN.

Judges comments

We really liked this programme’s business-school education approach, which aimed to help support leading MS consultants in the development of their service offering and lead to real improvements in patient care. As an industry we can sometime be very blinkered, so this is very brave, and great to see. An excellent programme that exceeded all expectations, bringing a diverse group of specialists together and achieving 100 per cent behaviour change is indeed an achievement.