Six reasons to apply for The Mary Seacole programme

The Mary Seacole programme is aimed towards clinical and non-clinical colleagues who are moving towards their first recognised leadership or team management role and want to do more to champion compassionate patient care.

It’s delivered through a combination of face to face or virtual workshops and online learning to fit around the realities of our busy lives. Here are some reasons to submit your application:

1. It’s highly relevant to actual situations and can be applied in the workplace

A set of new tools or information alone won’t help you achieve change in your organisation; the programme provides learning and support delivered in the context of the challenges we regularly face every day and is firmly grounded in reality.

The programme has also been improved in line with participant feedback to include more practical management skills training such as finance and HR fundamentals like recruitment and selection and sickness absence.

This type of training isn’t included in much of the clinical or academic learning on offer. Being absolutely tailored to the NHS, participants told us that the programme materials were highly relevant to actual situations, allowing for almost immediate application in the workplace.

2. Feel more confident in your leadership skills

Many of our participants sign up to the programme thinking they can’t be a leader because they don’t ‘fit the mould’. One participant said: “I always thought a leader had to be someone who was charismatic, had a loud voice and had to be heard.”

The Mary Seacole programme will free you of your preconceptions of leadership and encourage you to look within yourself for the right leadership style, rather than comparing yourself to others. It does this by increasing your awareness of yourself and your abilities, enabling you to more clearly identify:

• Which styles fit your strengths
• Your emotional intelligence and how best to use it
• How your behaviours might impact on others

One clinical midwife commented: I’ve become more confident in conflict negotiation and chairing difficult and sensitive meetings. This in turn has helped me lead my senior team with more conviction and confidence which in turn has helped improve patient care.”

3. Increase your self-awareness and be more aware of your colleagues

Leadership in healthcare – whether formal or informal – requires the ability to understand our own emotions and those of others. That’s because working in healthcare often evokes strong emotions, whether they come to the surface or not. Effective leaders know that engaging with the emotional life of workplaces gets results.

This programme will help you see that emotion is not a weakness; and goes a step further by showing you how it can be transformed into an asset.

4. Develop your leadership skills as well as your technical skills

Clinicians are trained in medicine, so may not smoothly slot into the art of leadership without development. You may already have several clinical qualifications but wish to develop more practical leadership skills that aren’t traditionally included in medical training to enable you to progress further.

This programme will give you the headspace to step out of and therefore improve your habitual and embedded ways of working. Nurses in particular tell us of their tendency to be ‘immediate problem solvers’, ‘jumping straight in’ based on their instinctive perspective of what was needed. This programme will help you stand back and assess issues before acting.

5. Learn how to overcome cultural barriers

Organisational culture remains the single most reported barrier to programme participants achieving change. This is usually around individuals perceiving change – good or bad – as a threat.

You may often see areas which could be improved, or indeed have tried to make improvements and faced barriers. This programme will give you the perspective to:

• See how you’re already in a position to influence and implement change
• Give you real strategies to achieve it

As important as the situational barriers are the behavioural, some of which are self-created due to lack of confidence. Participants tell us that the programme gave participants the authorisation and confidence to speak up more frequently or loudly when they saw an area of concern.

6. Make a real difference

Many participants say the programme has fundamentally changed the way they lead, and will continue to lead in the future.

As part of the programme, you’ll identify an improvement initiative within your workplace that you can focus on and implement. This gives you a concrete example through which to apply your learning.

Participants credit the programme for giving them the authority, capacity and motivation to implement an initiative they otherwise wouldn’t have been/felt able to, with a positive impact on patient care being the ultimate outcome.