Opportunities
Quality Improvement, Leadership and Management
On this page you will find leadership and management training opportunities, webinars and events, updates and links to resources.
If you have any questions please contact [email protected].
Programmes to help you grow as a leader
North West Leadership Academy Programmes
North West Leadership Academy are a proud member led NHS organisation operating since 2007 across the North West. They work to provide a wide range of impactful leadership development interventions, support, and opportunities to develop leaders and increase capability at all levels.
For New Leaders
Want to get ready for your first leadership or management role? The Edward Jenner programme will build your foundation-level leadership skills
A self-guided suite of short courses. Online with interactive discussions
For New Leaders
If you’re in your first leadership role, the Mary Seacole programme will develop your knowledge and skills in leadership and management
100 hours of online learning plus three behavioural workshops
For Mid-level Leaders
For mid-level leaders aspiring to lead large and complex programmes, departments, services or systems
120 hours of online learning, four days of workshops and small group work
For Middle to Senior Leaders
For middle to senior leaders, this programme will help you challenge the status quo, drive lasting change and prepare for senior roles
24-month programme, leads to MSc in Healthcare Leadership
If you’re a senior leader who wants to move into a board role, the Nye Bevan programme will help you develop the skills attitudes and behaviours you need to succeed
12-month programme. Online learning, residential workshop and self-managed learning sets
For Senior Leaders
If you’re a senior leader who wants to move into a board role, the Nye Bevan programme will help you develop the skills attitudes and behaviours you need to succeed
12-month programme. Online learning, residential workshop and self-managed learning sets
Further NWLA Manager and Leaders Courses:
Want to develop your leadership skills and knowledge to build a greener and more sustainable health system?
A 16-week programme with a choice of online learning or face-to-face learning
A programme for people working in health and care, who want to improve the way they collaborate across organisational and professional boundaries to design and deliver better health outcomes
Are you a manager or supervisor in health and care looking to develop your inclusive leadership skills?
This programme is a suite of self-guided online short courses
Coaching and mentoring are helpful tools to support health and care leadership development
Search or sign up to the Coaching and Mentoring Register and explore regional offers
Schemes, forums and resources to ensure clinicians at every level have career development pathways to develop the skills they need
Find out more about development support for clinical leaders
A significant system wide piece of research was undertaken and tested with a wide range of cross sector colleagues resulting in a deeper understanding of the kinds of behaviours needed to enable effective system leadership across the public sector.
The approach enabled the exploration of what this kind of leadership might look like, acknowledging the scale, diversity and complexity of the system and the importance of collaboration and co-creation. The research identified four overarching themes, each underpinned by a series of supporting behaviours in a System Leadership Behaviours Framework.
The Foundations in System Leadership; collaborating for health and care programme is open to all colleagues working in health, care, local authorities and voluntary sector partnerships, who have a desire to improve the way they collaborate across organisational, professional and hierarchical boundaries to design and deliver better health outcomes for the communities they serve.
Further Training and Programmes
Watch back: Anxiety in the Workplace
The Leadership for Personalised Care programme
The Leadership for Personalised Care programme is suite of cutting-edge learning and development programmes aimed at leaders at all levels in health, social care and beyond, to help them champion personalised care, community development and co-production and lead system transformation from the ground up. Leadership for personalised care requires a paradigm shift from seeing public services as simply ‘providing’ a solution to focusing on what matters to people and families, in the context of their whole lives and communities. It is a person- and community-centred complex adaptive approach to leadership. It involves specific actions around individual care – ensuring approaches like care and support planning, social prescribing and proactive support for self-management are in place, but also creating the conditions for these things to happen, an in the most effective and asset-based way.
NHSE hosted training
Find out more and book here.
Topics include:
- Having safe and effective wellbeing conversations – line manager training
- A Kinder Manager – The expectations of line managers in relation to people management
Programmes
Quality Improvement
Improvement Fundamentals (NHSE)
A radical programme of online courses for those involved in health and social care.
Improvement Fundamentals is a programme of online, self-directed mini-courses in quality improvement (QI) for those involved in heath or social care services.
The courses are free to take part in, and are delivered entirely online in the form of videos, articles, discussion and practical exercises that contribute to your own improvement project.
The programme is organised into four essential learning areas or suites.
- Quality improvement theory
- Quality improvement tools
- Measuring for quality improvement
- Spreading quality improvement
Each course will be facilitated for a week, during which time participants will have access to SI’s topic experts for guidance and advice. Following this, participants will have time to work on their own local project.
Learners are able to complete the courses in their own time, with each taking around 2.5 hours in total. This can be done all together or in half hour chunks throughout the week.
Throughout the programme, participants will be guided to put their theory into practice and can submit a piece of work at the end showing how they have done this.
After successfully completing each mini-course, you will receive a certificate of completion for your Continuing Professional Development (CPD) records.
By completing all of the four courses available, you can apply for Advanced QI Hiker status.
The first four courses in the Improvement Fundamentals programme are running one a month all year.
The schedule of courses is:
| Course | Dates |
| Course 101: An Introduction to Quality Improvement Theory | April, August, December |
| Course 201: Developing Improvement Aims and Conducting PDSA Cycles | May, September, January |
| Course 301: An Introduction to Measurement for Improvement | June, October, February |
| Course 401: An Introduction to Spreading Improvement | July, November, March |
The courses are now open for enrolment on the QI Learning platform. If you are a new user, please register on our QI Learning Platform first, and then enrol onto the courses from the home page
During the first week, our expert facilitators from NHS England’s Improvement team will be on hand to answer your questions and offer their insights in the social spaces on the courses.
Improvement Fundamentals in a Day (NHSE)
Kick start your team’s improvement project
Improvement Fundamentals in a Day is a toolkit designed to provide all the resources you need to run your own local quality improvement (QI) workshop, without requiring any improvement expertise yourself. The aim is to tackle challenges and drive improvements in services, with potential gains in staff time and efficiency.
Based on NHS England’s Improvement Fundamentals massive open online course (MOOC), it provides step-by-step guidance and facilitator videos on each of the techniques, as well as exercises and supporting templates.
All you need is good general facilitation skills (the toolkit provides the improvement expertise), and you can run a workshop that will teach a number of key improvement skills. By the end of the workshop you will have produced all the documents you need to kick-start your improvement project, from defining your aims to completing measurement and spread plans.
Improvement Fundamentals in a Day is CPD-accredited and all workshop participants can gain CPD points from taking part.
Using NHSE’s toolkit you will be able to run your own QI workshop. Ideally the workshop will be based around a challenge or project that you wish to address locally. You will assemble your team and the materials indicated in the toolkit instructions.
Each session in the workshop is based around a single improvement theory or technique, with a video from a virtual QI tutor. You play the video and pause it when instructed to carry out the exercise as per the guidance. You will also be handing out the templates or materials and facilitating any discussion in the room to see how the methods apply to your own project.
Each session covers some background or theory on the tool, a chance to experiment with the technique, time to work on a practice project and finally develop your own project.
The facilitator guide included in the toolkit will talk you through:
- What materials to print out or assemble in advance;
- How to guide your participants through each session; when to play the video; when to pause and do an exercise; rules or instructions for each exercise and all the templates and instructions you need.
The workshop is designed to run in a single day spanning five hours, but can be amended to run over two days or split into single sessions as required.
| Session 1 – Introduction Explains the purpose and format of the day. |
Session 2 – Energiser |
| Session 3 – Introduction to Quality Improvement What QI is, why it is important and an introduction to the Model for Improvement. |
Session 4 – Exploring the problem – Writing Aims |
Session 5 – Measurement for Improvement |
Session 6 – Exploring the problem – Fishbone Diagrams |
Session 7 – Change Ideas |
| Session 8 – PDSA with the Marshmallow Exercise Provides some light relief and energising after lunch while encouraging team working and creativity with the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) method. |
Session 9 – PDSA Cycles |
Session 10 – Spread |
| Session 11 – Networking and close A short round-up of the day. |
The toolkit contains:
- A PowerPoint presentation to use on the day containing links to all videos
- Links to all instructor and expert videos to use
- All worksheets and templates required on the day for the exercises
- Helpful handout for participants to remind them of the key points of techniques learnt
- Exercise instructions for the local facilitator
- Facilitator guide and session plans to guide the local facilitator
- Certification application sheet.
Please email [email protected] to receive a digital copy of the full toolkit with all attachments by email.
Further Quality Improvement Programmes
A unique and innovative Lean improvement programme for those involved in health and social care.
This fully subsidised, CPD-accredited Lean online programme is the first of its kind in the NHS. It introduces Lean improvement concepts and tools through a series of practical, structured learning-in-action massive-open-online-courses (MOOCs) that can be applied immediately to your improvement priorities.
The challenges leaders in health and care to deliver large scale transformational change.
To support leaders in this task, NHS England’s Sustainable Improvement team and the Horizons team have refreshed and updated a 2011 publication, Leading Large Scale Change: A Practical Guide, to reflect today’s unique health and care landscape and challenges, and have produced a supporting webinar series and a masterclass series.
The refreshed guide provides a vital and comprehensive round-up of all the latest thinking and practical approaches and tools that can be used in advancing large scale change programmes.
The Change Model is a framework for any project or programme that is seeking to achieve transformational, sustainable change.
The model, originally developed in 2012, provides a useful organising framework for sustainable change and transformation that delivers real benefits for patients and the public. It was created to support health and care to adopt a shared approach to leading change and transformation.
Source4Networks is an online platform designed for network leaders in health and care, developed by NHS England’s Sustainable Improvement team and London South Bank University.
The platform provides an easy way to keep up-to-date with best practice, case studies, methodology, and access to network development tools, and to be a part of a thriving community of network leaders from across the health and care system.
The platform is comprehensive and evidence-based, and aims to enable network leaders to undertake comprehensive diagnosis of the effectiveness and impact of their networks.
Watch the animation with an overview of the Impact Framework.
As part of NHS England’s role supporting large scale change programmes, the Impact Framework has been developed to systematically capture the impact of these programmes of work. The Impact Framework has been developed based on approaches used by others in the field of developmental evaluation, tailored to support improvement work in complex systems.
NHSE have developed the FolksLab Toolkit to help staff in the health and care system to run effective and practical workshops. The aim is to tackle challenges and drive improvements in services, with potential gains in staff time and efficiency.
Originally a Swedish concept, FolksLab is a proven method to help organisations and teams to identify new solutions to specific problems in a way that is rapid, creative and accessible, removing barriers to participation. The new toolkit is based on experiences of delivering FolksLab workshops specifically in NHS and healthcare settings.
Go back to school and drive improvements by creating your own online learning course.
Have you thought about the opportunity to engage hundreds or even thousands of people in online improvement learning? Do you want to learn how to run your own interactive and collaborative online courses and live learning events?
NHS England will be running “MOOC School” – a series of webinars sharing best practice to guide you through how you can go about setting up and running your own online learning event.
MOOC stands for massive open online course, but the style and skills needed equally apply to collaborative online courses, interactive learning webinars or social events.
What's happening
Resources & Videos
Please find useful updates, information and resources below
7. Leadership and talent management – Read more here
NHS Professionals
Offering programmes such as Appraisals and Review Meetings, Coaching Skills, Project Management, Developing your team and much more!