Paired Learning is one of the campaigns that NHS Change Day is supporting this year. The Paired Learning campaign would like people to pair up with someone who works in a different profession to them but who they want to learn more about, to enable better partnerships in the future. This could be between a doctor and a Physio, a hospital manager and a community services provider, a commissioner and a GP trainee, or just about any other combination one might think of. By getting to know each other through paired learning, you can learn so much more about each other’s roles, values, challenges and barriers and therefore make a difference for the future.
You can find out more about the Paired Learning campaign and find out what you can do to support it, at the Paired Learning campaign page.
Alex Borg is Deputy Chief Operating Office at Birmingham Children’s Hospital. Here he shares his NHS Change Day action to set up paired learning:
What do managers do?' and 'I wish I had met a manager before I qualified as a doctor' are probably two of the most common things I hear when I first meet up with a junior doctor over coffee.
Hi, my name is Alex, and for the last 9 years I have been a manager in our NHS. I was fortunate enough to be involved at an early stage in 'paired learning', a wonderful program set up at Birmingham Children's Hospital which seeks to improve collaborative working and the building of relationships between junior doctors and managers, which is now a national NHS Change Day campaign.
The programme has been a big success thus far, with two cohorts of junior doctors signed up, as well as most of the managers in the trust. The programme has allowed me the privilege of getting to know so many of our junior doctors; their frustrations, hopes and fears, as well as their favourite parts of the job. I must say, I was surprised how little they had been exposed to management and leadership as part of their curriculum, and subsequently in their career thus far. I think this represents a genuine gap in how we prepare medical students for life as doctors, particularly given the wealth of research that demonstrates the importance of clinical leadership.
It turns out I wasn't the only person to whom junior doctors had suggested that meeting a manager earlier on would be helpful, and so we decided to do something about it. Through her role in NHS Change Day, Lydia, one of the people who set up paired learning at Birmingham Children’s Hospital, had got to know a couple of members of the Medical Leadership Society at the University of Birmingham. Following a conversation with them, we were invited to give a presentation to the Leadership Society about management in the NHS, as part of the launch of a paired learning programme between the society and graduate management trainees.
We talked about how we came to be managers, why we chose the profession, the highs and lows of the job, and talked through a few scenarios we had come across in our careers as part of an interaction session discussing how they might have approached the problem, and what information we considered in arriving at a decision.
The presentation went well, and a few weeks later we had been invited back, this time to talk to around 250 fifth year medical students. We adapted the presentation slightly, but decided to make the interactive scenarios the cornerstone of the presentation, based on feedback from the leadership society. We have had some early feedback, and pleasingly, most reported that they had enjoyed the presentation, and that their understanding of management in the NHS had increased, which was what we set out to do.
The feedback also suggested that the medical students would prefer to learn more about management in the NHS through smaller, tutorial groups. And so, we are setting these up as part of our action for NHS Change Day 2015, will you join us?
changeday.nhs.uk/user_action/management-tutorials-for-medical-students.