“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced” [1]. James Baldwin, the Black American writer and civil-rights essayist, captures why the truth about healthcare is heavy — and clarifying. Those of us in clinical and organisational leadership are used to carrying targets, safety metrics and workforce […]
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I’m a Dad… Get me out of here: Leadership Lessons from Parenting. By Dr. John Okocha
The game has changed — v3.0. You’d be forgiven for thinking I was referring to the launch of the latest iPhone or PlayStation. Alas, that’s how I announced the arrival of our third child to my unsuspecting WhatsApp community. Let’s call her “game-changer” — for three reasons. First, at the time of writing, my wife […]
Reverse engineering accountability at its best. By Dr. Amanda Woolley
“There’s just no accountability” they cried when I asked why nothing changed. Why are inequalities still worsening? Why are some settings still not safe? Why can’t we make the ‘left shift’? And I knew what they meant – the leaders – but I wondered how this could be when they also complained that too much […]
Kindness in leadership: Moving the dialogue from productivity to engagement. By Anna Baverstock and Paul Molyneux
The need for increased productivity has become a prevailing narrative underpinning much of the NHS 10-year plan. With latest analysis from the Kings Fund highlighting that productivity remains lower than pre pandemic, challenged finances across the NHS and growing demand for services, it is unsurprising that increased productivity is seen as a necessary step to […]
The cultures we work within: Belonging, silence, and the cost of exclusion. By Farheen Akhtar
The silence after the storm Months have passed since the riots that many experienced as deeply Islamophobic. Yet for many NHS staff, the aftermath has been marked not by dialogue, but by silence. One colleague described arriving at work: “I had to put on a smile for patients, but inside I felt invisible. No one […]
Changing Attitudes to Work in the Workplace: How Do We Keep Our Workers? By By Kish Bhatti Sinclair, David Beattie, Cate Bell, Suzanna McGregor & Nagina Khan
Why Are So Many Leaving the Workforce: How Can We Make Them Stay? Health, social work, and social care in the UK face a deepening workforce crisis. In March 2023 alone there were over 112,000 NHS vacancies (an 8 % vacancy rate). This staffing shortfall is a result of compounded pressures: austerity, Brexit, and the COVID‑19 […]
The numbers game and portfolio careers. By Dr. Takanayi Mureyi
The numbers game Here we stand in the midst of the horrors of the newly released 2025 specialty training competition ratios for UK doctors(1). For those less familiar, this refers to the number of applicants divided by the number of available posts in each specialty — a measure of just how competitive each field has […]
The NHS’s digital blind spot: Why clinical safety can’t be an afterthought. By Dr. Keith Grimes and Dr. Youssof Oskrochi
The uncomfortable truth about our digital reality The recent “letter” from NHS England’s CCIO regarding Ambient Voice Technologies (AVTs) served as a wake-up call to practitioners about responsibilities when deploying digital health technologies and AI in clinical settings[1], and exposed an uncomfortable truth: many clinicians were unaware of the legal obligations surrounding digital tools. In […]
“ChatGPT is not your doctor, dietitian, or therapist”. Why we urgently need safety evaluation standards for generative AI in health, but who will take the lead? By Alex Ruani
AI is entering healthcare at breakneck speed. Headlines celebrate above human-level performance on medical exams, while tech giants showcase models capable of everything from clinical reasoning to patient counselling. Yet behind the promise lies a grim reality: ChatGPT and its peers are not doctors, dietitians, or therapists. They are probabilistic systems built to generate convincing […]
Why your patient’s results might be invisible to you – a call for clinicians to advocate for better, safer, data. By Alexander Churton, Kanthan Theivendran, Felix Peckitt and Mohamed Elriedy
Many of us have experienced a modern-day healthcare challenge: the complexities of the information governance (IG) processes that safeguard patient data. Data sharing is key for care provision, understanding how systems are working, and improving services delivered. As a collective of clinical and technical professionals, the authors are calling for clinician engagement to help shape […]