The Strategic Peer Support Programme

Supporting senior clinical leaders to strengthen their leadership capabilities and deliver lasting quality improvements

What is it?

NHS Improving Quality and the Faculty for Medical Leadership and Management (FMLM) are working in collaboration to pilot an exciting Strategic Peer Support (SPS) Programme.

This unique programme aims to demonstrate the value and benefit of peer to peer support, as it subtly differs form coaching and mentoring relationships.

The goal of the programme is to provide ongoing support and solutions to senior clinicians in challenged trusts, helping them to gain the skills to deliver quality improvement and change for their organisation.

The SPS programme matches senior clinical leaders from challenged trusts facing challenging and complex service issues, who aspire to strengthen their leadership, transformational change and quality improvement capability; with 'expert peers', who have either been through a similar process or have experience of successfully leading transformational change or improvement.

With facilitated learning sets and access to developmental resources from the Chartered Quality Institute and BMJ Quality, this is a real-time, supported solution to help face the challenges currently faced in driving forward continuous improvement in health and care.

How it works

The SPS programme commenced in January and will run through to September 2015, and it consists of supported peer meetings, and development days for pairs to come together to share their experiences. These regional development days will be held on:

• 18 March, London
• 8 July, Leeds
• 16 September, Midlands/South

The days give the opportunity for the peer network to come together to learn, share and problem solve together.

Peers can expect to take part in 6-8 peer support sessions (2-3 hours per session).  These sessions may be held either face to face or virtually to meet the needs of the pairs.