On June 28th, 2017, the Council of Deans of Health celebrated their 20th anniversary at the Museum of the Order of St John in London. This was a well-attended event with council members and invited guests from a variety of organisations. The format of the event was a 10-minute presentation from 4 leaders on the topic of leadership followed by an address from Dame Jessica Corner the outgoing chair of the Council of Deans and from the incoming chair Brian Webster-Henderson.
The 4 speakers included Jacqui Lunday, AHP Officer Scottish Executive Health Department, Jean White Chief Nursing Officer Wales, Danny Mortimer CEO NHS Employers and Professor Thomas Kearns Executive Director Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
As the speakers shared their views on leadership I started to think about what they were saying and whether this matched my own view of leadership and what I expected of both myself as a leader and what I expected in others involved in healthcare.
Certainly, I found myself agreeing about a lot of what was said about for example needing to engage in collaborative team working, ensuring we act as influencers and getting a place around the decision-making table. Good advice from Jean White was don’t wait to be invited and take your own seat if there isn’t one left for you!
All the speakers engaged in discussion on the workforce shortages being faced in health and social care and the challenges facing us and how we ensure safe and effective practice. As the presentations unfolded I got to thinking about the role of leaders in this context where on the one hand the call for person centred, safe care but a reminder that globally there is increasing demands and globally a shortage of 12 million skilled healthcare workers. It struck me has people talk about needing registered healthcare professionals to work ‘at the top of their license’ a term I heard again today used by Professor Ian Cummings to address the challenge of a limited workforce that we need to be clear what we mean by this term.
My concern is that in trying to address the workforce issues we will see the continued pressure for registered healthcare professionals to take on more and more of the ‘technical’ aspects of healthcare seeing these as the ‘top end’ end of their scope of practice in the mistaken belief that the more hidden but actually more complex graduate levels skills of communication, education, negotiation and decision making that take place alongside what looks like more ‘basic’ tasks will be delegated away to a less educated workforce.
My role I feel as a leader is to voice my concerns that there is a danger of failing to protect the poor and vulnerable thinking that their healthcare needs can be addressed by others whilst we use our limited resource of graduate level practitioners to do what looks like highly skilled technical things that in the future (possibly quite near future) will be done by the technology without human intervention. Inequalities in health are widening despite increased healthcare, we need our best educated healthcare professionals to be working at their ‘top’ using their graduate level skills to address the big health issues facing our society and not doing more and more technical tasks.
Ann Ewens, Dean – School of Health and Social Care, Ann.Ewens@staffs.ac.uk