I started in January 2015 on the Florence Nightingale Leadership Scholarship thanks to the kind sponsorship of Health Education North Central and East London. I wanted to use the Scholarship to enhance my leadership skills to enable me to work more effectively with partners and thus enhance the change required within health services around the eradication of female genital mutilation (FGM). My improvement project was and remains centred on eradication of female genital mutilation within England. I am currently working in partnership with the Department of Health and taking the lead for NHS England nationally across a programme of work to implement recent policy, this includes prevention, awareness raising, training, safeguarding and developing commissioning pathways.
At the start of the Scholarship I had commenced the lead for this work, however I was conscious that although I had worked nationally before this work was less structured, strongly aligned to both the Department of Health and the Home office and the NHS commissioning system had recently had undergone an extensive reorganisation.
This work involves working with partners; Police, Social Services, survivors and Politicians and although there is a shared objective to eradicate the practice the approach by each agency and the culture of each organisation is vastly different, this make the work both challenging and interesting.
The Scholarship came at the right time in many ways because on reflection the experiences I had through the Scholarship matched in many ways the areas I was increasingly having to deal with, for example there was an increasing need to raise awareness of FGM and present on the topic, the RADA communication skills training helped enormously in helping me think about how I could improve this skill. The Westminster experience which helped enormously with understanding how Government worked both from a functioning and behavioural sense, this helped me better understand the decisions and motives when working with government departments.
My personal leadership programme also involved me attending a residential course on Transformational leadership at Cranfield, without doubt this was the most life changing course I have ever been on both personally and professionally and with which I credit the most effective change in myself as a Leader.
The opportunity to travel to Europe to understand how other countries were tackling FGM was not as successful as I hoped, however the contacts I have for most European countries and being able to keep abreast of different approaches have added to interesting and useful debate and learning on the subject.
The Scholarship experience
I was strongly encouraged to apply for the Scholarship by my Line Manager as a previous scholar herself, the opportunity for a bespoke experience was attractive to really make the most from the year. I researched from the website what the Scholarship entailed and spoke to other previous Scholars who were all very positive in their feedback of their year. Another factor which influenced my decision to apply was the opportunity to network with other senior Nurse Leaders, I have found Nurses often work well as a group in supporting each other and have always enjoyed the comradery from previous learning experiences The numerous questionnaires and the 360 feedback helped enormously to make sense of what opportunities would best suit my learning style and areas for development. Having undertaken a number of both academic and developmental opportunities over the years at work I was looking for something that would help with leadership development that was more personal and really challenge me. In retrospect being selected for the 2015/16 cohort came at the best time for me both personally and professionally and has really helped shape and has contributed to the success of my improvement project.