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Written Statement - NHS Wales Skills and Career Development Framework for Health Care Support Workers | GOV.WALES

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Mark Drakeford, Minister for Health and Social Services

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The Home page of the Career Framework website.

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Our Digital Capability Framework for Healthcare in Wales is a practical, interactive tool, for individuals, and teams, to better understand the skills, behaviours, and attitudes required to thrive in a digital world. You will have an opportunity to reflect on your digital capabilities and self-assess, using our online tool, to identify your strengths and areas for development.

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Key points

We have facilitated several engagement sessions between our members and General Sir Gordon Messenger and his team. We are pleased with the way in which the review team has engaged with our members and how we have been able to inform the report's recommendations on how we can better support health and care leaders.

Many of the recommendations are welcome and reflect what our members highlighted as key areas of improvement, including how we can better support chief executives who take on the most challenging leaderships roles in the NHS.

The report rightly points out the gaps in support for leaders and what more can be done to ensure we deliver a consistent approach to leadership development at all levels within the NHS. This includes the need for a more consistent and substantive career development pathway from recruitment through to mid-career and beyond. It also talks about the value that needs to be placed on leaders and managers and the rewarding of collaborative behaviour as we move to systems.

The report also rightly acknowledges that we have much still to do to create a more diverse leadership in the NHS, but we also need tangible action and changes to ensure this happens. All too often, staff from ethnic minority backgrounds are still not being provided with the support they need to progress to leadership roles. We need to see a greater commitment to act on improving diversity in senior leadership, including making EDI a core aspect of the inspection regime.

However, we have been disappointed to see how the report has been positioned today in the media by the government. We have urged the Secretary of State to resist the temptation to misrepresent the report as an attack on NHS leadership or to indulge in manager-bashing. That is because the context in which leaders are operating is critical and the government narrative risks under-appreciating this. No amount of heroic leaders can make a system work which is overwhelmed with demand and dealing with more than 100,000 vacancies. There must be a fuller appreciation of the reality of how top-down demands are putting ever more pressure on leaders to service targets and efficiency savings.

Finally, we know that high-performing health systems require investment in effective management and, if anything, the NHS continues to be under-managed in comparison to other sectors. We must do more to support managers and leaders and we would urge the government to bear this in mind, while also doing more to support leaders in primary care and social care which this review has not considered as much as it intended.

Our summary and analysis of the review of leadership in health and social care, led by General Sir Gordon Messenger and Dame Linda Pollard.

What the review says

Aimed at ensuring the right leadership is in place at all levels, the review lays out seven recommendations that seek to support services to deliver the best possible care while tackling the challenges the pandemic exposed across the country:

Analysis

We have urged the Secretary of State to resist the temptation to misrepresent the report as an attack on NHS leadership or to indulge in manager-bashing

...the review must also look at how primary care managerial leadership development is delivered, as well as how we can better support leaders in social care

How we will be supporting members

Our Provider Collaboration Forum will be running action learning sets for those leading provider collaboratives, offering a crucial platform for peer support and learning.

We bring together provider and ICS non-executive leaders to discus s system working and to learn from one another. Read more on our leadership support web pages.

Our EDI programme supports members to improve accountability and leadership, tackling inequality through EDI and partnerships.

We will continue to work on behalf of our members to inform NHS England's new operating model, which is in development. This follows the recommendations of the report we commissioned Prof Sir Chris Ham to undertake on behalf of the NHS Confederation earlier this year.

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Key points We have facilitated several engagement sessions between our members and General Sir Gordon Messenger and his team. We are pleased with the way in which the review team has engaged with our members and how we have been able to inform the report's recommendations on how we can better support health and care leaders.

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Strengthening clinical leadership and management

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Strengthening clinical leadership and management could help the NHS to improve quality outcomes and boost productivity. We share findings from our research.