Evidence into Practice Homepage

Leading Better Care - Delivering for Patients

Leading Better Care enables Senior Charge Nurses / Midwives and Team Leaders to deliver better care in consistent, measurable, evidence based way

To achieve this vision, the following aims and objectives have been agreed:

LBC Aims

  • All Senior Charge Nurses, Senior Charge Midwives and Team Leaders will be working in the context of the LBC components:
  • To ensure safe and effective clinical practice
  • To enhance the patients experience
  • To manage and develop the performance of the team
  • To ensure effective contribution to the delivery of the organisations objectives

by March 2013 and able to demonstrate this.

  • Nurses & Midwives will be able to demonstrate  the contribution they make to the quality and experience of care that patients receive under the three themes by March 2013:
  • Safe
  • Effective
  • Person centred

  • Leadership and Facilitation

    Leadership is needed at all levels to drive forward continuous improvement. Leadership involves:

    • inspiring, enabling and transforming others
    • facilitating and supporting change
    • developing staff
    • and acting as a role model for others.

    Key questions

    • Who are the key leaders that are needed to achieve this development in practice and where are they positioned?
    • Does this leadership reflect the range of stakeholders?
    • How do we develop a shared vision amongst the leaders?
    • Are there any gaps in leadership and how can this be addressed?
    • How can the vision be shared to inspire and engage leadership at all levels?

    Consider

    • Stakeholder analysis
    • Ownership
    • Strategies for engagement/influencing at all levels
    • Leadership development programmes
    • Mentoring/coaching
    • Facilitation

    Organisations support

    Leadership at all levels can be achieved when:

    • Practice development is understood, valued and integral to the organisation’s aims
    • Development of practice is reflected in the corporate and personal objectives of senior managers
    • Managers are aware of resources and capacity for frontline staff to deliver improvements in care

    More on organisational support

    Nina Fraser, former Director of Nursing, NHS Shetland, believes that leadership and facilitation have a significant role to play and do not always need to come from senior managers.

    “We need to recognise when a practice development approach is going to be more effective than simply deciding a change needs to be made and pushing it through. That is part of the leadership role and while a project does not always require a senior level leader, it does require someone at that level to act as project champion.

    “At its best, leadership and facilitation can create an environment for staff to be creative about change and raise problems that might otherwise be missed or go unheard. For example, in one project, staff came back with ‘six messages for management’. This type of communication between staff and managers can be what makes the difference in the success of a project.”

    April 2009

    Click on the link link below to conduct a search within the Evidence into Practice portal.

    Please be aware that you will receive a set of search results, not a definitive list of literature relating to leadership.

    Literature search: