NHS England - Our shared ambition for compassionate, inclusive leadership

Summary

Compassionate leaders place quality of care at the heart of what they do, and respect and empower people drawing on and delivering care to achieve this together. This article sets out NHS England's vision for developing compassionate, inclusive leadership, highlighting that it results in better outcomes for everyone.

It sets out the following four priorities:

1. The NHS Leadership Academy will soon be publishing new NHS Leadership Competency Frameworks for system leaders. We support these frameworks and ask each of our professional bodies, colleges and employers to review their own systems to ensure that our leaders have the skills to lead compassionately today, with curiosity to transform our services for tomorrow.
2. We commit to supporting compassionate, inclusive leadership and doing what we can to create the conditions for it, including addressing issues that stand in the way such as bureaucracy and misaligned policy. This leadership is crucial to developing and maintaining an open and transparent culture committed to learning and continuous improvement, that is responsive and accountable to the public.
3. We will go further to open up the recruitment pool for future leaders and will support the recruitment and development of a diverse talent pipeline with the right skills, behaviours and values to be our leaders of today and tomorrow.
4. We will support those leading ICSs to develop a new kind of system leadership, which inspires collaboration, diversity of thought and experience, and always puts the well-being of people drawing on and delivering services first. ICS implementation guidance on effective clinical and care professional leadership can now be found here. We will lead by example and ensure that our people have the tools to support compassionate behaviours. This will require a continuous approach to lifetime learning and a growth mindset, based on an agile and evolving way of seeing the world.