Developing managers, health professionals and clinicians

Find out about

the leadership and management development programmes we are offering in the near future.

We provide leadership and management development and coaching to senior and middle managers, as well as clinicians. We are also highly experienced in delivering assessment and development centres to the health and social care sector. We support boards, including those that are newly formed, as they turn their organisations around and develop robust governance arrangements.

Leadership and management development

See our listings pages for the full list of leadership and management development programmes we offer as in-house programmes.

Management and leadership development for health and social care organisations is one of our largest areas of work. The approach we take emphasises the creative and vigorous thinking that leaders need in today's fast-changing health care environment. We know that managers and leaders need to work in close partnership with other organisations and must therefore develop an astute appreciation of the political and collaborative environment within which they operate. Our programmes therefore put great emphasis on developing the personal skills and confidence to bring all these aspects together.

OPM contact: Bob Baker, Senior Fellow, Leadership and Management Development
email Bob

Examples and resources

Leaders for Health Originally commissioned by the NHS Executive, the Leaders for Health modular programme for senior NHS managers is now run as an OPM open programme. What sets this programme apart from most management education is that it emphasises ways of increasing leaders' personal effectiveness as well as their understanding of the financial and political realities of the senior manager's role.

OPM's Valuing People Leadership Programme This programme is for middle and senior managers leading the commissioning of services for people with learning difficulties. It gives potential leaders the opportunity to develop their leadership skills, to focus on what is really needed to make change happen, to apply these to their work in the learning disability field and to develop the necessary support mechanisms to keep going in the face of entrenched cultures, traditional practice and financial pressures.

image of a flyer Leading Edge This action learning network for chief executives of health trusts across London looked at the influence that new developments in IT was having on the way they needed to manage their organisations' information requirements, their budgets and the staff who would be using the technology.

Leadership for global health This paper presents the results of a short project carried out to inform the 'human capacity building for global health' project for the Gates Foundation. The authors propose a model for leadership development, and assess some other approaches against it. Throughout, the emphasis is on leadership for health in a globalising world. Leadership for global health(PDF 195kb)

see also our set of main coaching pages which contain lots of information and external resources

Coaching

Coaching is a useful tool for supporting health and social care professionals and building capacity at all organisational levels. Members of newly established boards, in particular, are likely to benefit from the one-to-one support and challenge provided by a coach.

Examples

The Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) Diploma in Leadership Mentoring and Executive Coaching. This NQF level 7 programme for managers and HR professionals is accredited by ILM and recognised by the Association for Coaching. We run this as an open programme but are now offering it to individual clients for whom we tailor it to suit the needs and requirements of their management teams.

OPM contact: Paul Lloyd, Senior Fellow, Organisational Development
email Paul

Assessment and development centres

see also our assessment and development centres page for more about this area of our work with all sectors

'Intelligent boards' comprise strong leaders. We believe that senior managers need to be supported appropriately, particularly in the current, rapidly-changing health and social care environment. Leaders need to be skilled at: managing relationships at all stages of the supply chain; identifying the best ways to deliver outcomes; and building capacity within their organisations. We provide a range of options for assessing and developing leadership and management capability, including bespoke workshops, development centres and events.

OPM contact: Bob Baker, Senior Fellow, Leadership and Management Development
email Bob

Governance in health and social care organisations

see also our governance page which describes the innovative work we have been doing in all sectors

We do a lot of work with boards of health and social care organisations such as primary care trusts and mental health care trusts. All public service organisations are accountable to the public but those in health and social care in particular will find themselves in the glare of public opinion and need to ensure they follow best practice in their governance arrangements.

Examples

OPM has been at the leading edge of recent governance initiatives - for instance, through the Independent Commission on Good Governance in Public Services ('Langland's Commission') which we were instrumental in establishing and wrote up in the Good Governance Standard.

The New Governance Programme We are about to launch a suite of programmes for LHB and trust board members in Wales in partnership with the NHS Confederation in Wales. These include development programmes for newly appointed chairs, board member briefings and interactive workshops.

Board members programme and handbook We designed a development programme for new governors at an NHS trust who needed to know what was required of them and what issues they were likely to face. We then helped the trust develop a handbook for governors that those who had attended the programme could keep as a ready reference on what they had learned as well as a guide to how things worked 'on the ground'.

OPM contact: Judith Smyth, Principal, Public Governance

For more information about our work with health and social care organisations, please contact Paul Tarplett, Director, t: 020 7239 7800 email Paul