Browsing through the NHS Commissioning Board papers (as one does) I was interested to see the emphasis put on the notion of ‘membership’ for Clinical Commissioning Groups and the importance of distributive leadership.
Anyone who has worked in or with General Practice will know that harnessing the collective power of General Practice is not easy, but it is worthwhile. Like a shoal of fish, practices move independently but all can move quickly and vigorously in a new and positive direction, given the right context.
The question for leaders in Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) is how can they be different and truly generate membership and ownership of the agenda for CCGs across their constituent practices? How can they foster a sense of membership and purpose in commissioning across groups of practices whose priority is provision? Given the choice of attending a meeting to determine strategy, or attending to patients, it is understandable that clinicians prioritise patients. So how can a CCG engage with its membership? I hear this dilemma rationalised by people saying, ‘well it will only need a few GPs to be involved, not all of them.’ My worry is that that doesn’t feel like a membership organisation - that feels like the old way in a new guise. We need to do things differently if we want a real change to happen.
A couple of weeks ago I was given the opportunity to look into the social media site piloted by one of our CCGs in Lincolnshire. They had established what I would describe as their own ‘Facebook’. Access is restricted to member practices. The only way I got to see the content was with their permission. What I saw made me realise that social media provides a platform for making distributive leadership real. GPs can log on at their convenience and contribute to discussion threads about strategy and policy. Communication is a two way process between the clinicians who have stepped forward to involve themselves more deeply in the executive function of a CCG and those who want to know what the implications of Clinical Commissioning are, want their voice to be heard, but are willing, given that context, to support their executive colleagues. The site is also used creatively to integrate with wider operational issues. Each week, or if necessary daily, practices report on emerging pressures across primary care; that invaluable information is fed into the winter pressures teleconferences, which are held with the wider health and social care community.
The richness of the site content, its use by GPs and practices who, traditionally, have not been engaged and the strength of purpose it offered to the executive team made me reflect that it is innovations such as this that will unlock the real potential of clinical commissioning. Social media being used to engender a new form of distributive leadership needs a name – So Me Leadership?
