January 2023

Leadership for Personalised Care Newsletter

If you don’t see the images in this newsletter, open in browser by clicking on the link at the top.

New Year News from the Leadership for Personalised Care team!

Welcome fellow travellers to our first newsletter of 2023! This month we are looking forward to welcoming another cohort of participants to our national Leadership for Empowered Communities and Personalised Care programme. We are delighted that we are able to keep reaching and connecting with people across healthcare, social care and the voluntary sector. Read more below, as well as some exciting news about our new online course.

We also bring you more examples of people putting learning into practice. with news about our external evaluation, and case studies featuring Elle Gray, a trainee clinical associate psychologist and Melanie, a social prescribing linkworker. They are both supporting their clients with a personalised approach and inspire their colleagues and teams to do the same.

Finally, we share some thoughts on the important role that coaching plays for our leaders and congratulate our wonderful partnerships lead Julie Stansfield, Chief Executive of the Charity In Control, who is being awarded the British Citizen Award for Services to The Community on 26th January 2023.

With another year of exciting development and learning ahead of us, I am pleased that our movement for change continues to grow.

Thank you and see you soon

Catherine Wilton - Programme Founder and Director

Our Work

National programme update: Our new cohort begins!

We are excited for the start of our newest Leadership for Empowered Communities and Personalised Care programme on 26th January. Taking place over 6 days through to July, participants will take part in workshops, action learning sets and one-to-one coaching sessions. They’ll also get the opportunity to use a specialist 360-degree feedback diagnostic based on our Leadership for Personalised Care framework.

This cohort is made up of 28 participants, with a range of backgrounds from health, social care, housing and the community and voluntary sector. A key part of the programme is to learn from each other as well as the facilitators, so we know we will have great conversations ahead.

With each new group we continue to create a network of leaders committed to radical change and reform. Peer to peer learning helps us to cement that shared mission.

We are looking forward to supporting our new participants on their journey and hearing about the ways in which they apply their learning in their communities. We will share some of their stories with you in coming issues of this newsletter.

Exciting new FutureLearn programme launching soon!

Through our extensive understanding of leadership development, we recognise that individual leaders want to learn in different ways that suit them. Providing a variety of options for how the content of our programmes can be accessed is therefore something we are keen to do.

So we are delighted to bring you news of an exciting online programme, called ‘Introduction to Leadership for Personalised Care’. It will be available for free via FutureLearn, a digital education platform.

The 3-week online course takes people through the basics of why we need a new way of leading for personalised care and facilitates space for participants to think about what that could look like in their own practice.

The course is open for applications from January 30^th. We will be promoting this new offer on our Twitter and LinkedIn pages and ask for your support in sharing this new offer within your networks.

Our People

Putting leadership into practice

In each of our newsletters, we share with you stories of leaders who are driving forward person-centred approaches in their communities. This month we spoke to Elle and Melanie about how our programmes helped them become better leaders in personalised care.

Elle Grey is a trainee clinical associate psychologist with Solent NHS Trust and a former third sector manager and describes attending our programme as “transformational”.

During the Covid pandemic she led a team of social prescribers, care coordinators and health coaches.

She and her team recognised that community response groups provided resilience that was not available from the statutory agencies in the early days. “Our job was to support where needed and not get in the way.”

Later those relationships helped to draw volunteers from the groups for the vaccine rollout.

Ellenor also applies personalised care values in her interactions with team members. She says that she strips away hierarchy to enable staff’s passions and links to the community to be fully developed. Getting to know what team members really care about has transformed their work, freeing them up to focus on those areas.

Her top tip? “Spend time in your community, getting to know and love it. Ultimately, we are all service users, we all use hospitals and care and support services in our lifetime.”

Leadership developent for social prescribing linkworkers

Melanie is a social prescribing linkworker at Arun & Chichester Citizens Advice and participated in our programme in 2021. While she already worked with a personalised approach, she sought something ‘structured’ to enable her to delve further. She says that participation led to her feeling empowered to ‘disrupt’ in a way that she believes will bring meaningful change.

As a leader she seeks out ways to improve processes to make them person-centred, such as changing the way that social prescribers keep case notes, so that they focus on the person and their journey. She has also collaborated with local partners, such as working with a charity to design a gentle, personalised way of transitioning into the service.

Melanie is clear that the best way to influence change is to role model personalised practice. The changes she has adopted have sparked conversation and interest from managers and peers about how they practice in a personalised way. She hopes this will result in changes to how her colleagues work with their clients too.

Our impact on people and systems - findings from the Institute of Employment Studies

Towards the end of 2022 the Leadership for Personalised Care programme commissioned the Institute of Employment Studies (IES) to carry out an impact evaluation of our suite of programmes. We wanted to find out the impact of the whole Leadership for Personalised Care offer for individuals, their organisations and communities, so we could be clear for our funders and participants what difference our programmes can make.

As well as a survey of people who have been on a learning journey with us, IES are conducting 'deep dive' case studies into a small number of local systems that will tell the story of leading the change to personalisation. The case studies will document how far personalisation has travelled towards becoming business as usual and the role of the LPC programme in providing the inspiration and/or route map for change.

The outputs of the evaluation will be a number of individual case studies and an overall report pulling together the results of the surveys and case studies. Early results from the research are really positive and we will continue to share stories like Melanie's above, and futher data, as they become available. You can also check them out here.

Congratulations to our amazing tutor Julie Stansfield

We are delighted to announce that our very own partnerships lead Julie Stansfield has been honoured with the British Citizen Award for Services to The Community. She is set to receive her Medal of Honour on 26th January at the Palace of Westminster.

Julie has 30 years’ experience as a leader in the health and social care sector. She is co-founder and Chief Executive of the national charity In Control Partnerships, which instigated self-directed support and the personalisation agenda in health and social care policy and practice and is the lead delivery partner for this programme.

Julie is rooted in her passion for inclusion and enabling people to have the support they need to lead an ordinary life and throughout her career has led radical changes in systems, models and cultures within previously traditional institutional services.

We are so pleased that Julie's tireless efforts to make the world a better place are being officialy recognised and wish her all the best for a fabulous day next week!

Our Mission

Reflections on the value of coaching to further our mission

By Heather Simpson, Head of Programmes

The opportunity to participate in a 1:1 coaching relationship with an accredited coach, is an integral part of our Leadership for Empowered Communities and Personalised Care Programme. For some individuals who join the programme, this is their first connection with coaching.

Some of the first questions people often ask are: what is coaching and how will it benefit me?

John Whitmore describes how Timothy Gallwey, author of The Inner Game series of books, put his finger on the essence of coaching, by describing it as, "Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them." (Whitmore, 2002, p. 8).

In my experience as a coach and of being coached, partnering to explore what matters most from the inside out, venturing on a journey of personal growth and realisation of potential, I recognise the power in the coaching space. The power of speaking out loud thoughts that had been muted, the power of being listened to and heard, the power of sitting with a question that cuts through the noise and creates movement to a space of knowing from unknowing.

To continue reading this blog, and what our programme participant Amy Milford-Wood thought about being coached, visit our website.

Keep in touch

For every newsletter, we would like to include content from YOU, our network, alumni and participants. For example, we would love to include stories of how our programmes have helped you and the change you’re making on the ground to benefit people and communities.

Please get in touch with us on info@leadershipforpersonalisedcare.org.uk if you want to share something with us for the next newsletter, or fill in this form and we will be in touch.

We look forward to sharing more leadership for personalised care related content with you next time. In the meantime, please stay connected through our socials below.

Until next time,

The Leadership for Personalised Care Team