Client need

The National Management Development Initiative (NMDI), supported by Sir Nigel Crisp and delivered by the NHS Leadership Centre and the NHSU, aims to support the development of managers and future leaders to meet the challenges of the next five years. The purpose of the initiative is, in partnership with the Strategic Health Authorities, to design and develop a comprehensive management development process, and implement the first phase of this for up to 2,000 middle/senior managers. If successful, further phases will be embedded in local management development strategies, so the learning opportunities become routinely available.

South East London Learning Alliance chose to embark on this process and needed a programme director to coordinate, gain awareness and commitment across the sector and ensure the programmes success.

Our approach

With a deep understanding of how the sector operates and what the National Initiative needed to achieve The Learning Alliance agreed to target the management development needs of 80 primary care senior and middle managers in the sector, a currently underdeveloped area.

We focused on the following:

• Engaging with six Primary Care Trusts so that they would select participants for the programme
• Forming a steering group, from across the boroughs and other supporting agencies, committed to being advocates for the programme and to lead this initiative forward across the sector and develop sustainable methodology and partnership working
• Increasing awareness to the programme and the opportunities it presented for managers through an innovative communications strategy and intensive networking
• Design innovative solutions that provide a tailored intervention package to meet the development needs highlighted throughout the programme and by initial diagnosis
• Focus on multi disciplinary working and shared learning to maximise benefits to the trusts
• Measuring and evaluating the success of the programme at each stage in achieving key organisational objectives.

The results

Over the last three months the first stage of the NMDI programme has been completed within South East London. We had maximum number of people on each programme so the sector has got full benefit from the national initiative and all six boroughs were equally involved.

The feedback so far from the delegates has been exceptional and the steering group are now developing their strategy for the next steps for the year ahead, to further the development of key managers.

A mentoring programme has been initiated with 75 executives and senior managers across the sector volunteering to mentor the managers participating in the programme.