I’m not sure who NHS Confederation chief exec Steve Barnett was attacking when he spoke about leadership at the organisation’s annual conference.
He said that strong leadership by managers is crucial if the health service is to cope with future funding difficulties. But in fact, there’s a lot more to it than that.
We know that the NHS is already fully committed to developing a pool of new leaders, at all levels, to meet the challenges presented in healthcare today.
Yet in his speech Mr Barnett said: “It is preposterous to imply that such an enormous and complex service can operate effectively without the crucial role played by managers and leaders, whether it’s running a major clinical department, looking after a workforce of 5,000 people, or having to make tough decisions about the care that should be provided for a local population.
“Not only that, it does a huge disservice to the NHS and to patients. I intend to address that distortion head on and defend in a properly balanced way the real contribution that managers make delivering care to patients.”
But we now have an NHS National Leadership Council, and Strategic Health Authorities are charged with ensuring that leadership development plans are in place, to ‘grow’ the managers that the NHS will need in the coming years.
So who were you taking to task in your speech Mr Barnett?
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