There is a growing body of evidence of how poor leadership has contributed to
system failures that have resulted in a range of errors from misdiagnoses to failure to
recognise and respond to patient deterioration. A key challenge for healthcare
organisations is to develop and support cultures that ensure the delivery of
continuously improving high quality, safe and compassionate healthcare and place
strong emphasis on leadership. This programme aims to develop and test the impact
on patient safety cultures of collective leadership for healthcare. The research is
based on the premise that healthcare is delivered through teamwork and teams
should share responsibility and accountability for quality and patient safety. Enabling
this to happen requires an understanding of what leadership supports these teams
need in order to continuously improve quality and patient safety. The study follows a
systems approach, recognising healthcare as a complex system and identifying key
points and levels of intervention as essential to enabling a collective leadership
approach to create a change in culture. The recently established hospital groups with
their emphasis on creating networks of hospitals, delivering integrated safe care
provide a receptive environment to test this model. The programme of work will study
the development of leaders’ networks within such a recently formed hospital group.
In addition it will co-design collective leadership curriculum based on healthcare
teams’ leadership needs. It will then implement and test the impact of this curriculum
on leadership competencies, staff engagement and safety cultures. This approach to
conducting research in practice will ensure rapid implementation and scale up of the
intervention should it prove effective in developing leaders that support safety
cultures. The research will contribute to the growing literature on collective
leadership through the development of a model that explains the relationship
between collective leadership and patient safety cultures.
