Doctors who become chief executives in the NHS: from keen amateurs to skilled professionals

Doctors who become chief executives are self-styled ‘keen amateurs’ and there is a need to provide more structured support to enable them to become skilled professionals. The new faculty of medical leadership and management could have an important role in this process.

In this article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the authors investigate the experiences of doctors who become chief executives of NHS organizations, with the aim of understanding their career paths and the facilitators and barriers encountered along the way.

They identified twenty-two medical chief executives and of these 20 were interviewed. In addition two former medical chief executives were interviewed. Information was collected about the age at which they became chief executives, the number of chief executive posts held, the training they received, and the opportunities, challenges and risks they experienced.