My Leadership Journey.
The Florence Nightingale Leadership Scholarship over the past eighteen months has been an inestimable experience and has enhanced my leadership skills, given me greater self-confidence and belief, self-awareness and a better understanding of others what may be driving other colleague’s behaviour. Whilst this course is focused on the individual, it also emphasises the importance of understanding the world around us, as effective leadership is as much about the team, as well as great individual contributors. Working together will always have the most significant difference on improving care within the NHS.
Would I recommend this course to others senior managers within the NHS? Yes absolutely! I would describe the course as a bespoke Leadership Recipe, where the individual is able to mix and blend the personalised ingredients in order to achieve the best results. I felt at times I was on Master Chef, totally out of my comfort zone, but it is at these challenges times I knew I was learning and developing the most. I feel a lot more expert than I did at the start, but in leadership as in cooking you realise that there is an inexhaustible combination of recipes to try, new techniques and skills to attempt and end results that may not turn out exactly as intended at the start, but are still largely masterpieces. It is the knowing that there is so much yet to achieve, explore and develop that motivates me further. I hope I will always feel that hunger, because at the point I don’t will be the time to hang up the tea towel. Below I will describe a brief overview of my journey.
In 2013 I became a consultant midwife at Birmingham Women’s NHS Foundation Trust (BWNFT), it was my first senior post in the midwifery profession at an 8b. My work was centred around the setting up and implementation of a new dedicated homebirth team and extending the role of Maternity Support Workers to undertake the role of the second attendant at a homebirth (formerly undertaken by a midwife) to drive the homebirth rate up 1% year on year. To give the scholars a flavour of what the scholarship could provide and help plan the remainder of the scholarship, there were compulsory core courses and elements to the programme.
The first of these was the LCOR (Leading Change through Organisational Development Course) a three-day residential course, delivered by an American Stanford Professor. This gathering at the beginning of the scholarship was timely and a great opportunity to meet fellow scholars, having the time to get to know each other a little and build a sense of trust, which became critically important for other more intense and personal aspects of shared learning later in the scholarship. We were sent a hefty amount of paperwork with numerous Psychometric tests, including the Myers-Briggs and political awareness assessment, which were undertaken and analysed by a leadership consultant. This information was them used by The Florence Nightingale Foundation to identify a suitable mentor who would provide further support and advice to design a bespoke training programme. The intuition of the FNF lead was spot on when choosing a mentor for me and the mentoring relationship from the beginning was invaluable and a stabilizing influence throughout my scholarship.
The Florence Foundation itself is a great resource and has list and evaluations of courses that previous scholars have found useful. From reading what others had said I choose two, which was the Westminster Experience and the RADA Course, both were amazing. But it was through the Westminster Experience/networking that I met Baroness Cumberlege, whom a couple of weeks later asked me if I would be a panel member on the NHS England National Maternity Review. Over the next nine months (apt for a maternity review) I worked as a review member with eminent maternity stakeholders and contributed to The Better Births Report published in February 2016. This prominent report, endorsed by the health secretary and NHS England will shape the direction of the maternity services over the next five-ten years and beyond. The experience working at this level in terms of my leadership exposure and development is unparalleled to anything that I have done before and has broadened my skills and increased my confidence and self-belief. I observed and participated in strategic thinking, became increasingly aware of the many different political angels and agendas playing into the review. I networked and engaged widely with a broad range of maternity stakeholders both nationally and internationally. I was an active participant in communicating the reviews key messages through various media channels (appeared on the Victoria Derbyshire show with Baroness Cumberlege, had several interviews on local radio about our local services and the review, used social media for the first time, received numerous invitations to speak at professional conferences). The FNF Scholarship enabled be to undertake media training which fed into the work I was doing with the review team, which ordinarily there would not have been the resource to do. I have really enjoyed the experience and am continuing to relish the opportunities that have spiraled from this work; being a member on the Better Births stakeholder transformation programme, to continue to contribute to making the recommendations of the review a reality. Improving a good service to make it safer, more personalized, placing women at the center of care.
I organized a trip to the Netherlands, a country renowned for their high homebirth rate and lowest perinatal mortality and morbidity rate in Europe. It was an opportunity to learn from international practice and share with the University of Amsterdam what I was doing in the UK with regards to the development of the Maternity Support Workers Role. I also meet with the Buurtzorg team, primary care nurses who work with a self-management model and delivery proven higher quality of care at a lower cost to see if this model could be transferable in whole or part to community midwifery services. The final course I did was a 3-day residential course with the Leadership Trust in western Under Penyard, Leading change with Impact, which drilled into the theoretical models; their own IP which was extremely useful.
I am immensely proud to be a 2015 Florence Nightingale Scholar and again I would like to thank the Florence Foundation for selecting me, investing a considerable amount of time, money and resource. These past eighteen months have far exceeded any expectations I had at the start and I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. I will treasure the memories and the learning forever. The only downside is I don’t think anything else will ever match it in the future! The scholarship has enabled me to grow and developed into a more self-aware and effective leader. I have faced some huge challenges during this time; professionally, working at a national level, building a new team to provide a sustainable homebirth service, implementing changes in the skill mix of Maternity Support workers working as the second attendants at a homebirth, all against a tense working environment. My successes are partly attributable to my hard work, belief, passion and commitment in what I do, but also to the large amount of support and guidance that my fellow scholars, mentor, coach and leaders I have met through the network this scholarship has given me. It could not have come at a better time in my career and without the external support I have received I do not think I would still be in my current post. I have been humbled by the amount of time, very senior people have been prepared to give and feel indebted. I hope that over the forth coming years I can give back and provide benefit for others.