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This article for Forbes looks at new data suggesting that for almost 70% of people, their manager has more impact on their mental health than their therapist or their doctor—and it’s equal to the impact of their partner. It outlines leadership approaches to improve employees' mental health, including self-management, impact recognition, fostering connection, offering choice and providing challenge.

In Maintaining motivation in uncertain times the King’s Fund advises leaders how they can best support their teams by offering structure and containment, protecting, encouraging, and creating opportunities. 

Challenges to the status quo present leaders with the opportunity and responsibility to not only respond but to learn and transform the system. This article from Slotkin et al. shares the experience of leaders at a large health system to design an emerging COVID response to effectively innovate to sustain improvement.

This commentary from Michael Fraser shares recommendations for leaders to meet COVID-19 stressors successfully. The article suggests leaders communicate well, be decisive, lead without hierarchy, remain proactive and take care of themselves to protect others.

Access to wide range of perspectives can bring creativity to solutions and the actions that implement them. This website presents materials that cover topics such as leading in critical times, building and supporting resilience, Leading to Innovate, change and adapt, teaming and working remotely, coaching peers and developing as a leader.

This regularly updated resource collection links to webinars, articles, and conversations that explore the role of leadership in crisis response. Topics covered include workforce, telehealth, operations and safety.

This month’s Letter from America looks at actions and strategies core to leading an organisation during unexpected enterprise-affecting crises. Letter from America is the latest in a Patient Safety Learning blog series highlighting new accomplishments in patient safety from the United States. “There's no such thing as the unknown—only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.” James T. Kirk, Captain, Starship Enterprise. Star Trek, Season 1: The Corbomite Maneuver. Leading a large enterprise isn’t easy. Vision, compassion, humility, curiosity and adaptability are required attributes for those in charge to keep moving forward during times of relative calm or uncertainty. The stress and tragedy that accompanies catastrophic events can reduce the resolve and effectiveness of even the most accomplished leaders. Unprecedented large-scale situations, such as the Hurricane Katrina landfall or the September 11th terrorist attacks, reveal gaps in understanding that may not have been apparent before the disaster. These blind spots can dismantle the reserve of a leader and their team to culminate in poor decisions, inaction and organisational dysfunction. The COVID-19 pandemic is such an event. Rules are being mindfully adjusted to respond to the litany of process, clinical, financial and political disruptions healthcare workers must grapple with as they face the uncertain conditions of their patients, communities and themselves. It is incumbent on leaders to create stability by addressing these unknowns. Leaders within hospitals, social care organisations and within the public health spectra need to make immediate process adjustments to optimise effort, realise opportunities for improvement and learn to be resilient. They need to arrive at understanding while simultaneously managing challenges that emerge from the strained system to keep their enterprise on track. They need to do this by paying attention to safety culture, transformation and innovation, and will need tools and resources to do so. Leadership must build a culture to keep patients and workers safe. Leader’s communications and actions are core to the implementation of safe working conditions to provide the best care possible during a crisis. Yet, a Gallup poll of US healthcare workers found a lack of understanding of their organisation’s COVID-19 plan and lack of belief that safety policies in place will support their safe return to work. To address this gap, experts recommend leaders three steps to a better safety culture: use formal and informal mechanisms to explicitly communicate what the organisation is doing to keep staff informed and safe during the pandemic enlist their managers to implement policies, create opportunities to align the work of management and hold managers accountable to implement and sustain current practice and procedure talk to their people. Keeping an open dialogue through the use of established mechanisms such as ‘rounding’ can solicit insights and raise concerns to enhance the safety of teams and patients. Leadership must see opportunities to transform systems: COVID-19 has presented leaders with immense responsibility to act, adjust quickly as required and use those process changes to improve the overall system of care post-pandemic in preparation for the next unprecedented challenge. Geisinger Health System leaders in their article, 'How one health system is transforming in response to Covid-19' share the experience of designing their emerging COVID response to reliably innovate rather than only react. Leaders examined core system business concerns such as pharmacy and information technology by bringing together multidisciplinary groups that dismantled silos. Teams worked together using scenario planning to fully consider how restoring care processes, entering new work phases, preparing for the second wave and restoring financial viability would affect patients and employees. Leadership must use evidence and collective knowledge to adapt: The Journal of Public Health and Management Practice shares recommendations for leaders to meet COVID-19 stressors successfully. The article suggests leaders communicate well, be decisive, lead without hierarchy, remain proactive and take care of themselves to protect others. For example, to lead across a system seek expertise from a variety of organisational and environmental elements. Working with government officials, staff and peers can form collaborations, solidify shared purpose and distribute responsibility to serve a community well in crisis. Public health is a core partner in understanding how to guide, motivate and inspire change to enhance a collective response to COVID-19 and upcoming health threats. Clinicians in patient-facing leadership roles also exhibit these behaviours as their roles shift to manage crisis. The perspective of a New York cardiologist leading a COVID-19 infections disease service illustrates how the transfer of tacit knowledge around deliberate leadership observed daily while coordinating the service shaped his views on leadership and his ability to lead. Being emotionally available was a core characteristic that helped to express grief, exhibit vulnerability and openly share concerns, giving the experience the humanness it needed. This was important not only in his ability to mature as a leader but to demonstrate the empathy needed to get his team through the challenges at hand. James T Kirk knew how to lead. He sought consensus, learned from mistakes, yet acted as necessary to keep his crew safe, engaged and aligned with the organisational mission. He sought partners across the federation as needed. Kirk could be firm, decisive, yet empathetic. Have health leaders done similarly to protect staff, patients and the community, while gaining experience during COVID-19 to apply over time to enrich the care system at large and boldly go to a better, safer future?

This podcast from the Kings Fund asks, what’s the scale of the challenge currently facing the NHS workforce? Helen McKenna talks to Prerana Issar about the NHS People Plan, her career journey and what inspired her to take up her role as Chief People Officer for the NHS.

The national bestseller that offers prescriptions for an economic world turned upside down.

This article is from the US-based organisation - The Joint Commission, published by Sentinel Alert Event. The Joint Commission’s Sentinel Event Database reveals that leadership’s failure to create an effective safety culture is a contributing factor to many types of adverse events – from wrong site surgery to delays in treatment.

Teamworking is fundamental to the future of general practice. Practices are coming together at scale in primary care networks and new roles are being introduced, creating multidisciplinary and multi-agency teams. Making these teams function effectively is a complex task.  This guide from The King's Fund brings together insights from their research, policy analysis and leadership practice. The need for collaboration and communication underpins much of the guide and it providex further reading and case studies to support each section. Some of the sections will be more relevant to you than others, but if you are a GP, practice manager or other professional working in primary care, or you are supporting practices, this guide will help you think how you will go about creating and sustaining effective teams within general practice.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement ran a National Forum CEO and Leadership Summit in December 2019. This slide pack gives an overview of the summit, including speaker presentations and key objectives of the meeting. Summit objectives: to foster connections and support networking across the Alliance to surface key issues that are top of mind to Alliance leaders to support capacity around personal, organisational, and industry leadership to promote discussion and activities that foster and advance courageous, creative, collaborative leadership across the network to inform and advance the direction of engagement, collaboration, and collective action opportunities across the Alliance network.

Effective communication is critical for patient safety. One potential threat to communication in the operating room is incivility. Although examined in other industries, little has been done to examine how incivility impacts the ability to deliver safe care in a crisis. In this US based study, the authors sought to determine how incivility influenced anaesthesiology resident performance during a standardised simulation scenario of occult haemorrhage. In conclusion, although self-assessment scores were similar, incivility had a negative impact on performance. Multiple areas were impacted including vigilance, diagnosis, communication and patient management even though participants were not aware of these effects. It is imperative that these behaviours be eliminated from operating room culture and that interpersonal communication in high-stress environments be incorporated into medical training.

'Letter from America’ is a Patient Safety Learning blog series highlighting fresh accomplishments in patient safety from the United States. The series covers successes large and small. I share them here to generate conversations through the hub, over a coffee and in staff rooms to transfer these innovations to the frontline of UK care delivery. Movies from 1939 are engrained in American culture. They share narrative, characters and quotes that people are aware of even if they, alas, haven’t seen the films. The list of films produced in what some consider the finest year in Hollywood history speaks for itself; it includes Stagecoach, Ninotchka, Destry Rides Again, Mr Smith Goes to Washington, The Wizard of Oz and both my and the Academy’s favourite, capping the impressive output with a December 1939 release, Gone with the Wind. While recognising that certain characterisations in these movies haven’t aged well, the films have made an indelible mark on Hollywood history. The films of 1939 laid the groundwork for great things to come. They launched the careers of artists that have made a cultural mark worldwide: need I say more than John Wayne or Judy Garland? Another capstone to a productive year is the end of the 20th year post the publication of To Err in Human. The widely influential 1999 US publication showed us how to fight for patient safety – our Tara. It outlined approaches to address the seemingly reoccurring tornadoes in healthcare built to instead point toward home – a safe health system. Scarlett’s tenacity, her force of personal will and sustained belief in Tara is what pulled her through the maelstroms of civil war Georgia. Clinicians, however, cannot rely on grit and willpower alone to address clinical and organisational threats to safety. The lack of control to minimise systemic pressures on their moral imperative to do a job well in non-supportive situations reduces a clinician’s ability to practice safely. Building on the To Err is Human legacy, The US National Academy of Medicine (NAM) is committed to understanding factors that contribute to unsafe care. A NAM recent report on burnout lays out a system-focus strategy for organisations to reduce conditions that degrade physician health and, thus, safe practice. Dorothy’s quest to return home energised her instead to engage a multidisciplinary team. The skills of Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion and, yes, even Toto got them through the forest to safety. Without their individual commitment to the mission, humanness and competence the team would have never gotten to Oz. The American Association of Medical Colleges (AMMC) recently released a set of competencies expected in physicians to support quality practice. By suggesting what educators embed in their training efforts, the AAMC helps ensure learning opportunities that build competencies are embedded in programmes on the yellow brick road to safe care provision. Transparency helps us to see situations as they really are. Peaking behind the curtain enables exploration that, if used appropriately, can drive improvement. Toto pulled back the curtain to expose a threat that, once clarified, launched a collaboration that got Dorothy back to Kansas. The US-based Leapfrog Group has also forged a partnership to look behind the curtain. The latest release of the Hospital Safety Score data has focused attention on what isn’t working to support safety while celebrating hospitals that demonstrate sustained safety and quality. The scores track weaknesses in hand hygiene, infection control, and patient falls as elements of whether a hospital is safe. There have been challenges: wicked witches, budget constraints, refusal to accept change and conflicts. It has not been an easy road to Tara since Err is Human was released. Experts in the field have shared their dismay in the lack of progress. Yet stories of resilience, partnership and teamwork continue to motivate the resolve of Dorothy and Scarlett to keep going. Goal-focused efforts can backfire and not live up to their expected purpose. The South didn’t win the Civil war though they believed it was their destiny to do so. Scarlett never won back Ashely no matter how hard she tried. A recent article published in Health Affairs highlights the lack of correlation between the US Medicare and Medicaid programme reimbursement initiative and direct impact on patient safety in the state of Michigan. Its impact is questionable—which for a large-scale solution embedded throughout the system—is humbling. Questionable actions can be a human reaction to stress that needs to be called out and managed to reduce their presence and impact. While centering her as a force for action, Scarlett’s spoiled and selfish behaviour also destroyed her most meaningful relationship. Such destructive behaviours degrade relationships needed for the safety of care. A large US study published in NEJM found that harassment and inappropriate behaviours effect one-third of general surgery residents surveyed, particularly women. The mistreatment and bias generated by both patients/families and medical team members were identified as a key factor in burnout and physician suicide. The stories from great films of 1939 illustrate the power of grit, resolve, focus and leadership as elements of achievement. They share with us memorable characters that live with us long after the movie theatre lights come up. Through the embodiment of the tenacity of Scarlett and the team-focus of Dorothy we can and will work through the known barriers to reduce patient harm due to medical care. We have not yet arrived at Tara, but we continue to work tomorrow toward getting over the rainbow.

An audio recording of Harry Cayton, Chief Executive of the Professional Standards Authority, speaking at the Kings Fund conference, Patient voice and power in the new NHS. Harry talks about the importance of the patient voice and the impact that different leadership styles can have within the NHS. A transcript is also available to download.

Encouraging diversity in the NHS isn’t simply a matter of inclusion, it’s a matter of patient safety, delegates at the Healthcare Excellence Through Technology (HETT) conference have heard. Speaking on 2 October at the Healthcare Excellence Through Technology conference, Heather Caudle and Ijeoma Azodo, both members of the Shuri Network, stressed the importance of diversity when developing new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI).

The highest performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety – the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Studies show that psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off – just the types of behaviour that lead to market breakthroughs.  This article in the Harvard Business Review suggests six practical points to create a psychologically safe environment. 

The Care Quality Commission (CGC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. They make sure that health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate, high-quality care and encourage care services to improve.  Independent acute hospitals play an important role in delivering healthcare services in England, providing a range of services, including surgery, diagnostics and medical care. As the independent regulator, the CQC, hold all providers of healthcare to the same standards, regardless of how they are funded.  In this report the CQC have seen much good and outstanding care, in particular around: responsiveness staff interactions with patients effective treatment leadership and engagement with staff and patients. However, there were a number of areas where services needed to make substantial improvements: governance clinical audit safety culture.

This is issue 30 of HindSight magazine (a publication about the safety of air traffic management). The theme of this Issue is ‘wellbeing’, which has an undeniable link to safe operations, though this is not often spoken about. This issue coincides with the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors of the articles were considering wellbeing in the context of aviation, and other industries. But the articles touch on topics that are deeply relevant to the pandemic. The spread of the virus and its effect on our everyday lives has brought the biological, psychological, social, environmental, and economic aspects of wellbeing into clear view in a way we have never seen before.