Authenticated user menu

Search
Blog
23 November 2011
Total views

Send for the Clinical Leadership Fellow

I saw an advert in BMJ Careers last week. It is searching for a cohort of newly CCT’d doctors to be Senior Fellows in Clinical Leadership. This is the first time I have seen a job advert that is seeking consultants primarily for their management and leadership potential (other than medical director type posts). Clinical leadership posts have traditionally been seen as mainly clinical, with leadership bolted on the side. There have been schemes recently providing specific training in clinical leadership that included experiential learning. But this advert says they want consultants mainly for their potential in leadership and management and, that they are going to be required to do a job of work in leading change.

The preamble of the advert suggests that this NHS Trust is setting out on a specific journey of change and wants to buy in some talent in leading this sort of change. They have been inspired by the success of the Darzi fellowships (only open to trainees) to create a similar scheme for more senior doctors.

However, there are some potential pit-falls for this experiment: these are fixed term post CCT posts. These doctors could be seen as new blood full of bright ideas at the optimum place in their careers to bring about disruptive and creative change before going on to bigger and better things. They could also be seen as junior consultants without a substantive consultant post who are just there to make up the numbers.

The people who take up these posts will have to take on two new roles at the same time: that of consultant and leader. This could work two ways. You will be free of the history of long standing relationships with more entrenched colleagues which frees you to find new solutions. On the other hand, they could see you as not a colleague but ‘the management’ in consultant clothing. Is this post a challenge or a opportunity? Would you apply for this post? Would you create similar posts in your hospital? Is this a tipping point for clinical leadership or just another evolutionary step?

 or  Register to add a comment

About the author

Duncan McPherson's picture

Duncan McPherson

Duncan is a Specialist Registrar in Anaesthesia and Pain Medicine in Wessex. He is researching an MD on patient safety.

Jobs

Array ( [0] => sitewide [1] => advert_external_leaderboard [2] => not_front_desktop [3] => advert_external_wideskyscraper [4] => comments [5] => comments_login_prompt [6] => jobs_content_pages [7] => node-social-accelerators [8] => node_blog [9] => related_content [10] => advert_internal_desktop )