The radical change required by personalised care requires new leadership across health care, social care and the voluntary sector. This is a shift from traditional top-down, siloed ways of working to co-productive, collaborative and multi-disciplinary practice.
Individual leaders need to learn, embrace and embed the principles of personalised care, co-production and community building into systems where they live and work. It is no longer enough to focus solely on leading organisations efficiently. Some of the most difficult to solve problems in society need lots of people working together to solve them. Supporting people with long-term conditions needs a holistic and joined-up approach, not a simple ‘fix’.
Leadership for personalised care requires a paradigm shift from seeing public services as simply ‘providing’ a solution to focusing on what matters to people and families, in the context of their whole lives and communities.
Leadership for personalised care is therefore a person- and community-centred complex adaptive approach to leadership. It involves specific actions around individual care – ensuring care and support planning, social prescribing and support for self-management is in place, but also creating the conditions for these things to happen.
Focusing on what really matters to people means things need to change. We need leaders who are confident, willing and able to work across boundaries and to put what matters to people over the needs of a single organisation.
These leaders need the skill, will, knowledge and confidence to work across boundaries and systems to drive health improvements across the whole population. They need to come together across health care, social care, the voluntary sector and beyond.
These skills are detailed in our Leadership Framework, focusing on four themes: Being; Relating and Communicating; Leading and Visioning; and Delivering.
You can become this leader. Start your journey by checking out our free bitesize programme or our in-depth development programmes.