The Healthcare Leadership Model

The Healthcare Leadership Model has been developed to help staff who work in health and care to become better leaders. It is useful for everyone – whether you have a formal leadership responsibility or not, if you work in a clinical or other service setting and if you work with a team of five people or 5,000. It describes the things you can see leaders doing at work, and is organised in a way that helps everyone to see how they can develop as a leader. It applies equally to a whole variety of roles and settings that exist within health and care.

The model helps you to understand how your leadership behaviours affect the culture and climate you, your colleagues and teams work in. Whether you work directly with patients and service users or not, you will realise what you do and how you behave will affect the experiences of patients and service users of your organisation, the quality of care provided and the reputation of the organisation itself.

The Healthcare Leadership Model is made up of nine ‘leadership dimensions’, each of which has its own page on the NHS leadership website. There is a brief description of what the dimension is about and why it is important, and a section that says ‘what it is not’ to provide further clarity.