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Fellowship in Clinical Management Programme
The ORH is leading the way in involving clinicians in service development, through its Fellowship in Clinical Management programme. Piloted as a single post in August 2007, the programme takes junior doctors in training and offers them the opportunity to be involved with clinical management as an alternative to the more traditional options of research or purely clinical training.
Left to right: Doctors Imran Anwar, Ele Lambert, Mary Weisters, Lloyd McCann and Mary Thompson, standing in front of a portrait of Dr John Radcliffe|.
Consultant Vascular Surgeon Mr Ashok Handa, who initiated the programme with Director of Performance Improvement Andrew Murphy, says: "As the NHS changes, we need much more clinical involvement in management and leadership, and at the moment, most doctors are not being exposed to this during their specialist training. This programme seeks to change this, bringing benefit to patients, the Trust and the trainees."
Mary Weisters, the pilot fellow and surgical registrar, worked on projects with the Churchill Day Surgery Unit and the Surgical Emergency Unit (SEU).
With clinical and management mentorship, and close working with the departments, Mary was able to achieve a big improvement in Day Case rates for a piece of keyhole surgery called Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy and Hernia repair. She also supported a project that achieved significant decreases in the length of stay and time from admission to investigation in the Surgical Emergency Unit.
On the basis of this first successful pilot, four further Fellows in Clinical Management have been recruited from disciplines as diverse as Radiology, Primary Care, Public Health and Surgery. Mary has chose to stay on for a second year and enrolled in a Masters in Health Services Management at Warwick University, whilst continuing to be involved in a range of projects, including the improvement of the emergency and trauma list utilisation and a service improvement project in CT scanning.
Each of the Fellows has a clinical and management mentor allocated, and the ambition is to link up with the NHS Education South Central training programmes in clinical leadership and management. It is hoped that this kind of role can become more common in the NHS – and Trusts in London are already following where the ORH has led with its Clinical Fellows programme.
"The Darzi report shows that the future of the NHS is going to be more, not less, clinical involvement in management," says Andrew Murphy, Director of Performance Improvement. "And this programme is about combining the best of both worlds. It's good for developing management skills in clinicians as well as bringing clinical insight to management practice – not to mention the benefits for patient care."
Some examples of their projects are found in this section of the website.