Leadership in Healthcare Practice

MSc Leadership in Healthcare Practice
Mode: part-time (2-3 years)

Effective leadership is vital for developing healthcare practices in response to effectively appreciating and responding to the needs of patients and service users within diverse and complex care situations. Certainly, successive Government health White Papers emphasise the need for effective leadership at all levels of the organisation [NHS Plan, Making a Difference].

Such leadership needs to be collaborative in working within multi-professional practice settings and able to unleash the full potential of each person. Such leadership is transformational in nature, and seeks to create and sustain an organisation that can learn from experience. This course is designed to meet these needs and those of busy healthcare professionals by adopting a work-based blended learning approach, by offering a range of interim awards and ensuring opportunities for participants to pursue and develop their own areas of professional and/or clinical interest.

The truly innovative aspect of the course is developing a narrative of being and becoming the leader the student desires to be. This approach enables the student to integrate learning onto his or her leadership journey of transformation and realisation.

The course is conceived as a collaborative research project, working with the leaders to appreciate the nature of leadership especially working in healthcare organisations and to use this reflexive understanding to develop the programmes to reflect essential leadership within healthcare organisations. The result of this collaborative endeavour will be published in a book entitled Seeking Tansformational Leadership within a Transactional World [Blackwell Publishing].

Why choose this course?

• The learning approach is based on the principles of work-based learning, whereby you utilise your own everyday lived practice experiences as the basis for learning and fashion the course to suit your particular learning needs. In this way, you tailor the course to meet your agenda, although you will be guided to know and explore what your agenda is, within the wider community of inquiry nurtured throughout the course.
• Well-established and positively evaluated leadership programme that is innovative, practical and tailor made to suit each individual leader. The University is home to the International Reflective Practice Conference and the leading edge development of reflective practice in health care through the work of Professor Christopher Johns, the Programme Leader.

Career Opportunities

Successive Government papers emphasise that effective leadership is vital for the development of health care services. As such, the student will be well placed for career developments concerned with leadership, management and advanced clinical roles where leadership is necessary.

Teaching/learning methods and strategies

The emphasis of learning is on active methods of learning, both individually and in groups. The approach will be predominantly through reflection, supported by teacher guidance, lectures on key topics and guided reading.

Reflection is a systematic approach to learning through your everyday experiences with the aim of holding and resolving creative tension. In doing so, you gain insights into self and practiced that are applied either deliberatively or subliminally to future practice within the reflexive spiral of being and becoming the leader you desire to be. Insights are informed as appropriate by a critique of relevant literature. In this way theory and practice are juxtaposed and theory meaningfully assimilated within personal knowing, enabling practice to be appropriately informed by research and theory.

The approach to learning acknowledges that you have diverse needs and interests. Hence you are guided to shape the unit programme through identifying your own specific learning needs and KSF skills to meet through the unit assignment.

All work is experientially driven leaving it as your responsibility to read and explore the theory in depth and in relation to your personal needs and interests, which you identify through reflection on significant experiences and worked through in action sets or in other negotiated ways to meet the module’s specific learning objectives in order to realise 150 hours of student effort.

Guided reflection is supported by key lectures to introduce theoretical approaches.

Student conferences

The programme has two student led conferences planned:

• Leading through change
• Leading to ensure quality

Assessment

A variety of assessment approaches have been developed to enable the leader to reflect on his or her realisation of desirable leadership at a critical masters level of education. The fundamental approach is reflective practice- to reflect on experience [Am I becoming a transformational leader? What factors are hindering me?]

In this approach, you will be constantly applying ideas to practice and subsequently reflecting on their impact. Only in this way can you meaningfully apply theory to practice.

Two units [change and quality] ask you to write project reports, enabling the development of critical project writing skills. These projects are linked to conference presentations and planning – although such skills are not summatively assessed.

Dissertation/project and research

The course is designed around the dissertation. This is written as a reflexive narrative that plots your journey of being and becoming the leader you desire to be using guided reflection as a process of self-inquiry and transformation.

The ensuring quality and leading change units are project modules. This work is presented as project reports and presented at locally organised student led conferences in July each year.

Recommended reading

• Johns C 2006 Engaging Reflection in Practice: a narrative approach, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing
• Johns C 2005 Transforming Nursing Through Reflective Practice, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing
• Johns C 2004 Becoming a reflective practitioner [2nd edition], Oxford, Blackwell Science