Practice manager masterclasses

Excellent leadership is essential to the effectiveness of a GP practice, but sometimes leadership is hard to identify or shifts about. This interactive programme helps participants understand the differences between leading and managing, examines why power is so elusive, and explores ways of becoming an effective leader as well as an excellent manager.

Topics include:

• Leadership – how it works and understanding its impact
• Identifying the qualities which make a good leader
• Knowing your leadership style
• The impact of poor or unclear leadership on the practice
• Power – what this means
• Understanding sources of power
• How power works in the practice
• How to be an effective leader and practice manager
• How and when to take the lead
• Leadership under the radar

Practice managers don’t have the time or resources to spend on things that don’t work, don’t
serve our patients and that could be done either more efficiently or effectively. They need ways of identifying whether things work, how well they work and the reasons for this. This interactive programme helps delegates undertake this using Quality Improvement (QI).

Learning outcomes

• Inform on quality improvement, the methods and tools.
• Practise using some of the QI tools.
• Understand the barriers and enablers of using QI.
• Go back to your practice and use QI.

Healthcare is a safety critical business – when things go wrong patients can be harmed. This one-day course provides an introduction to the principles of safety and risk in the context of UK general practice.

Participants will be introduced to the concept of the practice as a system and will consider how safe systems can protect individuals working in that system from making mistakes that can lead to patient harm.

The course covers basic principles of risk assessment and risk management that can easily be applied in the general practice setting.

Participants will consider the role of practice managers as the patient safety champions within practices.

If primary care is to take a lead within the NHS it must understand some of the basic business tools required to enable service redesign together with some of the required governance to enable legitimacy.

Major decisions also require a structured longer-term strategic process which is equally relevant as commissioning starts to move from CCG to new models of care led by primary care.

The first stage of this masterclass will enable you to:

• understand how the commissioning system is applied today with its strengths and weaknesses
• learn the basics of the commissioning cycle with worked examples
• think about the implications for commissioning as new models of care emerge

Stages two and three will be predominately group work with groups selecting an area for redesign, such as COPD services. The aim is to use a clinical example of service redesign and then test the process. It is hoped that participants will do some preparatory work in identifying a topic area and then thinking in advance what information would they ideally like to have and how they would work with clinicians and other partners.