Blog: Collaborative Leadership, by Peter Noble, Managing Director of Lincolnshire Health and Care Collaborative
I have recently been fortunate to spend a few hours shadowing Professor Alun Roebuck, Consultant Nurse in Cardiology at United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust. It was humbling experience to see an individual at the cutting edge of clinical care, on a morning of extreme pressures.
What struck me was seeing him go about his duties while calmly directing, supporting and inspiring a truly integrated team. The pressures were self-evident, from ambulance arrivals to his assessment of patients in coronary care and intensive care. In less pressurised times this would have been no mean feat, but in today’s times it was astonishing. The man is a walking machine, an encyclopaedia of knowledge and has a lure for numbers.
Despite the intensity of emergency pressures, he has an uncanny ability to connect with patients in just a few words; putting them totally at ease and in control. Alun Roebuck is the epitome of why Provider Collaboratives exist….. he says what others may be wary of saying; he goes where no one else has gone and shows how it should be done.
Community Cardiology really has succeeded as a transformation programme and is an area others can learn from and scale in the future. Last week’s experience was no new staggering insight or complex algorithm, it was simply how collaborative leadership embeds itself in practice, where:
- Transformation is led across a System through a strong subject matter expert with dedicated full-time project resource
- There is a genuine willingness to take risks, break organisational silos and mould a truly integrated team – in the above illustrated across rehabilitation and the heart failure service
- The team displays absolute trust in each other where successful goals and setbacks are openly communicated
- The positive body language and eye contact on how the team communicates to patients, demonstrating an exclusive focus on them and how they connect with each other.
The impact of this work should not be under-estimated – the significant reductions in emergency attendances and admissions is spectacular. However, the above learnings need to go much deeper, into how such a collaborative leadership across teams releases such creativity and provide a culture that is productive and joyful, irrespective of emergency pressures.
Thank you Alun and Community Cardiology.
Peter Noble, Managing Director of Lincolnshire Health and Care Collaborative
Published 22/12/2022