The Centre for Patient Leadership will provide patients with the knowledge, skills and behaviours to become true agents of change. It will enable patients and carers to become effective and influential leaders in improving quality and promoting health.
There are unprecedented challenges to improving people's health and well-being. The NHS is in a turbulent period of change. The cry has gone up for innovation and leadership to get us through this mess. Yet the only ones deemed capable of leading 'us' are health professionals - clinicians or managers. It's time to shift our thinking.
How about if we plugged into the biggest asset of them all? People who know what it's like to live with health problems and continually find creative solutions to challenges in their daily lives and understand what needs to be done to improve services. People who believe in dialogue, trusting relationships and shared decision-making. What if patients and carers stepped up to the mark to become a new generation of leaders? What would they need to be able to do this?
We believe that patients and carers are a hugely undervalued and untapped resource. People's engagement with their own health is slowly being recognised as one way to shift how healthcare is being delivered. But attempts at creating a patient-centred health service and at supporting patient and public engagement still leave patients marginally infuential and rarely bring about sustained or radical change. Institutional approaches to 'involve' people seldom move beyond set pieces (consultations, surveys, focus groups), one-off projects or overly-bureacratic structures (with a seat for a tame representative). Well-meaning endeavours usually lead to tick-box, tokenistic exercises.
Now, patient and community leaders need to get smart. The time has come to develop a new cadre of Patient Leaders.
The Centre for Patient Leadership will help people develop the qualities necessary to lead change. Patent Leaders will be able and willing to work on their own personal development and be open to change; adopt a can-do attitude with an emphasis on creating solutions; work with others to build relationships for change; use their experiences constructively to work for change.
Over the last two years, we have been running learning programmes for different types of patient representatives (LINk Members, FT Governors, Patient Participation Group Members, etc) and community leaders (community researchers, health champions, etc). Over the coming months, participants on our programmes will have the opportunity to become members of the Centre for Patient Leadership and join a wider social movement for change and network of enthusiasts who can share ideas about how to improve health and healthcare.
If you want to know more about our programmes, or about the Centre, please get in touch. And watch out for the latest on developments on these pages.
