As one of the largest employers with some 1.4 million staff, working for the NHS offers opportunities for career advancement, with a wide variety of paths and the support of training and development resources designed to ensure the highest level of patient care.
Internal promotion benefits both the employees and the organisation
- Employees can build experience and develop their careers, boosting morale and reducing turnover.
- The NHS can retain valuable talent and recruit candidates familiar with the organisation’s culture, processes, and goals, ensuring a smoother transition into new roles.
Leadership challenges in the NHS
The NHS faces complex and significant challenges. The population continues to age and requires a healthcare service that can address increasingly multifaceted patient needs. Operational pressures are intensifying due to underfunding, workforce shortages, and a growing backlog of patients awaiting treatment. Leaders face challenges in recruiting and maintaining staff while personal demands are intense, and burnout is an issue. Introducing Integrated Care Systems adds another layer of complexity, requiring leaders to collaborate across organisational boundaries to agree on priorities and strategies that develop efficient healthcare services based on local needs.
Supporting new leaders in the NHS
Effective leadership is critical to the NHS, especially during transformation and challenge. Leaders guide an organisation through change while minimising disruption. Clinicians seeking leadership positions must balance their clinical expertise with strategic, operational, and interpersonal demands. NHS clinicians stepping into leadership roles are often asked to manage colleagues who have been their peers in the past. Comprehensive leadership development is essential to ensure these professionals have the skills to inspire teams, prioritise resources, and deliver patient-centred solutions in an increasingly complex healthcare environment.
Coaching for clinicians in new leadership roles
Without support, clinicians new to leadership roles can feel unprepared and overwhelmed, increasing the risk of stress and burnout and impacting their abilities to lead their team. This can result in lower engagement and productivity and, if unaddressed, can begin to compromise the quality of patient care. Coaching plays a crucial role in leadership development as it creates the time and space for leaders to reflect on their performance, identify development areas, build confidence, and unlock their full potential to be effective.
Why Therapeutic Coaching?
Therapeutic Coaching, which incorporates therapy and coaching, produces the best outcomes and changes in behaviours and levels of self-awareness. It combines the solution-oriented structure of coaching with the deeper, person-centred work of therapy. Therapeutic coaching helps individuals understand the obstacles that may be impeding their progress in a leadership role and discover their strengths, resilience, and wisdom to make meaningful change. Whereas coaching focuses on forward movement and therapy explores past experiences, therapeutic coaching integrates both to achieve meaningful, lasting change.
As the NHS navigates a challenging future, we must support clinicians as they transition into leadership roles. During the pandemic, over 300 NHS staff benefited from therapeutic coaching, showcasing its transformative potential. This approach supports leaders by helping them gain critical insights and develop the behaviours needed to drive progress in a complex healthcare landscape.
If you or someone in your organisation is a clinician moving to a leadership role, contact us to learn how Therapeutic Coaching can support them in this transition to become an effective and productive leader.
This post was written by Paul Beal, Director at Insightful Exchange. Paul is dedicated to empowering individuals to achieve their full potential both professionally and personally. He supports Insightful Exchange corporate clients with therapeutic coaching to build self-awareness and create a change in behaviours at individual, team and organisational levels. As a therapeutic coach he has his own practice, working with individuals to develop insight to enhance their performance at work and develop a fulfilling life.
