The long-awaited NHS Leadership Review, conducted by Lord Rose, a former M&S CEO has been published. ‘Better leadership for tomorrow’ includes 19 recommendations, all of which have been accepted, in principle, by the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. Among them is the recommendation that responsibility for the NHS Leadership Academy (NHSLA) should move from NHS England to Health Education England (HEE).
The Review was commissioned by Jeremy Hunt early in 2014, with a brief to examine how talent may be attracted and developed from inside and outside the health sector into leading positions within the NHS and to recommend how strong leadership in Trusts might help transform the way the NHS works. It was further extended to consider how best to equip Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) to deliver the Five Year Forward View.
In the foreword to the Review, Lord Rose says: “Simply put, this Review aims to make people better qualified to manage and to lead.” He stresses: “It is striking that the NHS has a central resource for quality but not for people, and these recommendations set out to address the fact that the people of the NHS are its main asset.”
The Review states that the level and pace of change in the NHS is unsustainably high and that the “administrative, bureaucratic and regulatory burden is fast becoming insupportable.” It lists three areas of particular concern as Vision, People and Performance.
Vision: There is a lack of a single NHS vision and a lack of a common ethos.
People: There is insufficient management and leadership capability to deal effectively with the scale and range of changes to which the NHS has committed.
Performance: Overall direction of careers in management is needed across the medical, administrative and nursing cadres.
The 19 recommendations fall into four categories: training, performance management, bureaucracy and management support. Two of the recommendations, described as “simple and profound,” are pre-conditions that Lord Rose says must be met before anything else can be effective. A single, service-wide communication strategy for the NHS needs to be established to enable news, information and best practice to be broadcast to NHS staff, Trusts and CCGs and a handbook for the NHS needs to be created, published and implemented throughout the NHS to summarise its values.
Lord Rose paid tribute to the service delivered by the NHS and the motivation and focus demonstrated by many staff, but said that: “the whole organisation could and should be made more effective by the application of some common-sense tactical and strategic thinking.”
