By Tony Berendt & Amit Nigam, Associate Editors, BMJ Leader

Welcome to the BMJ Leader blog. With the Covid-19 pandemic raging around us, leadership and management, in health and care systems, are more important than ever. We feel that BMJ Leader has a responsibility to respond to this unique global challenge not only through our role as a peer-reviewed academic journal, but also by providing more creative support for health and care leaders, whatever their context.

This blog is one outlet for that creativity. We see the blog as a space for sharing leadership ideas, insights or perspectives, however derived, speaking in a format that is less formal, and more agile, than the peer-reviewed journal. All contributions will be considered.  Our hope is that a diversity of contributions will generate lively discussion or comment, complementing the research contributions published in the journal. We aim, through this, to provide all leaders in the health and care sectors not only with interesting ideas to think about, but also with a space to share their resulting thoughts with others.

Tony is an Associate Editor of BMJ Leader. Tony trained in Medicine in Cambridge and Oxford, qualified in 1983, and studied the pathogenesis of severe malaria as an MRC Training Fellow (1987-1990) and a Lister Institute Research Fellow (1990). Completing specialist training in Infectious Diseases and General Medicine (1995), he developed interests in staphylococcal pathogenesis and musculoskeletal infection. He was Consultant Physician-in-Charge at the Bone Infection Unit (1997-2005) and Medical Director (2004-2011), at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre NHS Trust, then Deputy Medical Director (2011-2014) and Medical Director (2014-2018) of the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust. Since September 2018 he has worked as an organizational consultant and executive coach.

Amit Nigam, PhD
Professor of Management, Cass Business School
Amit is an Associate Editor of BMJ Leader.Amit completed a joint PhD in Management & Organizations and Sociology at Northwestern University. He was an Assistant Professor in Management at the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University before moving to Cass. His research examines organizational and system-level change in hospitals, health systems, and a variety of other contexts. His research has been published in a range of management, health services and medical leadership journals in addition to BMJ Leader. He was recently course director of the Executive Master in Medical Leadership at Cass, which offered leadership training to doctors. He is currently course director of the Executive Master in Leadership, which trains people from a broad range of professional backgrounds.