Year in review: 2023 highlights
2023 has been a year of transformation and leadership innovation.
As we head into the New Year, we’re looking back at just a few of our highlights from the past 12 months.
This year we have welcomed more than 2,000 leaders from across the North West to support their leadership development, capability and skill building.
These opportunities have been featured throughout the year in our Leader publications that we have produced to showcase our work with our members. Read more about our support to North West Clinical Fellows, creating a coaching culture, supporting workforce wellbeing and inclusive leadership.
Supporting a new, collaborative approach to leadership development we continued to work with the other regional Leadership Academies to deliver a portfolio of consistent leadership development offers and support for health and care leaders across all regions.
Working without North West collaborative, we have delivered eight expert masterclasses and were delighted to be joined by over 100 cross-sector leaders at each session to explore topics such as maximising the potential of our people, neurodiversity in the workplace, community leadership and leveraging opportunities for ICSs.
Following testing with pilot sites, the Looking After Your Teams Health And Wellbeing Guide was published in April 2023. Working collaboratively with the NHS England Health and Wellbeing team, the interactive guide was developed to support teams to build a healthy wellbeing culture through activities, helpful hints and an inspiration library.
Throughout the year we’ve had the privilege of working with a wide range of teams, organisations and systems to provide bespoke leadership development support.
Our Lead Positive programme welcomed 100 aspirant Black, Asian and other ethnic minority leaders from across Greater Manchester. This bespoke development programme aimed to address the barriers in the talent pipeline and build confidence, capacity and the ability to influence positive change. This unique programme provided an opportunity for Trusts across GM to pilot a new approach in their organisation to address these barriers.
In Hyndburn, we have supported two successful cohorts of leaders through a bespoke system leadership development programme, in collaboration with the Hyndburn Way team. The programme supports the development of system leadership approaches and enhance participants ability to lead system change.
We have been supporting the NHS Population Heath and Health Equity Academy with their highly regarded 2023/24 programme up in Lancaster. This is an intense programme over 8 months which includes both theoretical frameworks and experiential learning, internationally renowned speakers including Cormac Russell and which aims to foster authentic NHS leaders who understand population health, the importance of addressing inequality and the real benefits of community involvement and input.
We have also had the pleasure of working closely with colleagues across the North West Healthcare Science Network to provide this area of the NHS workforce with opportunities to engage with leadership development, for some colleagues accessing this time of development for the first time. This bespoke offer has included topics such as “Leadership vs. Management, what is the difference?” and “Understanding Self as a Leader”. The feedback received has shown the value and learning that colleagues have taken from these sessions and are able to implement in their day-to-day roles.
In July, we welcomed back our popular coaching and mentoring Network Learning Events! The North West coaching and mentoring community joined us to enhance their knowledge, connect, share and learn with colleagues at two Network Learning Events, with a third to follow in early 2024. The day focused on providing CPD to enhance skills, effectiveness and overall practice.
“Thank you for the superb network event. It was great to link in with peers across the region and there was so much learning and great practice and principles to take away from the event.”
Network Learning Event Attendee
In September we saw the anticipated return of our annual members event, the Festival of Leadership. Joined by over 150 senior leaders, the day started with a keynote panel focused on leadership for a collaborative and inclusive future. Attendees then moved to a series of workshops to explore topics such as adaptive leadership, inclusion and collaboration. Read the full write up in our Autumn Leader edition.
We look forward to you joining us again in 2024 for what is already shaping up to be a fantastic day.
We also established our new Chief Executive Network and Non-Executive Director Network as part of our commitment to continuing our support for senior leaders across the North West. Our CEO network will officially launch in February 2023, with excitement building for another fantastic series of NED network events to be held in 2024 following the final event of the first series in December 2023.
All of this would not have been made possible without our amazing team here at the NHS North West Leadership Academy, who are proud to support our members.
As we say goodbye to 2023, we encourage you to make a resolution to invest in your development and leadership capabilities.
You can keep up with what’s new at the academy on Twitter or LinkedIn by joining the other 150+ new followers we’ve welcomed in 2023.
Have you got a leadership story to share, or feedback for the team? We’d love to hear from you, so please get in touch.
We look forward to working with you in the new year!