For this reason, over the past 5 years the NHS Leadership Academy has been focused on developing competent and skilled leaders among the system’s nearly 41,000 General Practitioners who provide over 1.3 million consultations to patients each and every day.

“One of the current policies taking shape within the NHS is for Primary Care clinicians to become more involved in leading healthcare. This means that we need to increase the confidence of our Primary Care Leaders,” explains Sue Harris, Director of Leadership and Organisational Development at Health Education England. “And that’s our job. We’re here to enable our medical and clinical staff to step up and become increasingly prepared to lead.”

As the West Midlands Local Leadership Academy (WM LLA) began working to expand and deepen the Academy’s emphasis on leadership development for their Primary Care leaders, they quickly recognised the need for a different kind of framework; one that would deliver a consistent approach and a common language of leadership across NHS’ very large and extremely diverse system. With the NHS primarily funded as a public sector organisation, efficiency, sustainability, and the ease of ongoing implementation with internal Academy staff were key priorities in the development of primary care leadership interventions.

Throughout England today there are hundreds of medical practices of varying sizes—from solo practitioners to part-timers, small practices with as few as three employees to much larger groups employing 10–20 staff. It was clear that no one-size-fits-all version of a leadership development programme would work. The Academy needed a model that practitioners could grasp quickly and begin implementing immediately back on the job.
“In response to these challenges, we needed to develop a keep-it-simple model to bring different perspectives of leaders in primary care together, to develop them as leaders of change, and give them the confidence to transform their organisations and step up into leadership,” remarked Harris.