Engaging Clinicians in Strategy Development

In this series, we’re exploring how we hold the tension between “where on earth are we going” and “just do something”. In this 1-minute read, we’ll explore the critical aspect of engaging clinicians in this dynamic tension.

Clinicians and clinical leaders are a huge strategic resource to the NHS. Good clinicians and their teams understand the drivers for changing how healthcare is delivered today and the innovations that can transform. They read, research, learn and network. Yet, so much of today’s strategy development has limited clinical engagement. Why is this the case?

Last year, we worked on a six-month project with a large, multi-site acute Trust to develop a clinical strategy. An early design decision was that the strategy should be developed bottom-up, with each of the 35 clinical specialities, rather than at a higher level with the four Divisions. We all recognised that the detail would be most helpful, and that meant the process would be bigger (35 workshops), engaging many more viewpoints and more personalities!

Some of the key challenges that we managed along the way were:-

1. Time to do this – It took six months and meant that lots of people had to prioritise this alongside their operational responsibilities. Leaders explaining why it was important to do this now, giving permission, and ensuring we thanked clinicians for their input helped sustain engagement levels.
2. Building Trust and Relationships – Many of the 35 clinical speciality leads and Trust leaders didn’t know each other well (or at all). There was scepticism from some clinicians about whether the strategy would lead to change (we’ve been here before). And from some leaders about the clinicians understanding of the Trust’s constraints. Strategy development is a great opportunity to build relationships by working alongside each other on a shared exploration of the future. We had an ex-medical director on our team who also helped with offline discussions with clinicians.
3. Making it Interesting – There is a real risk that what should be really interesting (the future of our clinical services) can be boring (a collation of the usual national policies and directions). We used the clinicians as the experts and began the process by asking them to complete a template to describe their service today, the local and national context, the key challenges and opportunities over the next 5 years and their ideas for meeting these. Most specialities were pleased to do this, and some held team meetings and shared drafts.

The 35 speciality mini-strategies gave the foundations for Divisional workshops and identifying Trust-wide themes and interdependencies. Not surprisingly, the biggest theme was the workforce, and this bottom-up approach found specialities that were bucking the trend and making better progress that could be built upon.

Having a bottom-up, clinically developed strategy has enabled the Trust to more confidently get into their wicked problems, including the critical care model at their smaller hospital and the distribution of services across all of their sites.

If you’re considering how to plan your strategy development, feel free to contact us to talk it through.

Greater insights for leaders at our FREE webinar

Join us on 26th March, from 3 pm to 5 pm, when we will host a FREE webinar on Strategy in Complex systems with collaborators Terry Young and Andrew Liles.

To register for this FREE webinar, please email office@tricordant.com. Feel free to extend this invitation to colleagues interested in this topic.