Healthcare Blog

New research from CIPD and Simply Health surveyed 918 organisations across the UK, covering more than 6.5 million employees and shows that stress is still a growing problem in the workplace. 76%, up from 37% in 2019, of UK businesses have seen an increase in stress-related absence in the last year.

Supporting international medical graduates (IMGs) is crucial for ensuring a diverse and competent healthcare workforce. IMGs face unique challenges when seeking to practice medicine in a foreign country, and it is important for healthcare systems to provide support and resources to help them succeed. In this blog, we will discuss some of the ways in which healthcare organisations and communities can support IMGs.

To become an effective leader you need to be skilled in both giving praise and criticism. While praise is generally easier to give it can be far more challenging for managers to offer negative feedback to a colleague or member of their team. The reasons for giving negative feedback are simple, if someone doesn’t know they are doing something wrong they cannot do anything about it. Let’s also assume that not everyone comes to work to do a ‘bad’ job and work tirelessly in completely the wrong direction. If you did a bad job every day, wouldn’t you want to know?

The 70 / 20 /10 principle is well known across the learning and development community as being a great blend of professional training, support and coaching from key influences around the business and learning whilst you work.

Keeping up with the demands is challenging, however, it is suggested that rethinking how to attain greater productivity and the way this is measured, may alleviate some of the pressures. Productivity is a simple comparison between the outputs produced by the NHS i.e. the amount and quality of care provided, with the inputs used to produce them i.e. staff, equipment, drugs clinical supplies etc. Improved productivity can be achieved through efficiency and cost measures or alternatively by getting better value from the existing budget.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that leadership is something that only very senior people have to consider. In fact, leadership is a skill that every professional manager needs to master. Recently I attended a Maguire Healthcare training courses on Leadership and Management, our facilitator set the group an exercise to identify the skills, attitude and behaviours they observed within their hospitals every day.

The diagnostic framework and suggested management options attempt to provide guidance on the identification, support and management of trainees in difficulty and to provide clinicians with a systematic approach to dealing with these challenging and often complex issues. The pre-eminence of maintaining patient safety should be paramount when managing trainees in difficulty. Formal management guidelines and protocols from your local LETB/Deanery or NHS employing organisation supersede this guidance in all circumstances.