NHS-specific tools: the Board Health Review
The scale and pace of transformation required in the modern NHS demands leadership by highly effective boards. This means providing clear strategic direction, ensuring accountability and shaping new cultures of quality, safety and stakeholder confidence. Organisations are more likely to operate at optimum efficiency and effectiveness when they are led by boards operating at the top of their game. This is the conclusion of several public and private sector reviews and enquiries on the critical role that good governance plays in performance and quality. This becomes all the more vital in a challenging new policy context.
Now there is a valuable new resource to help NHS boards excel in this new policy environment. Commissioned by the National Leadership Council, Foresight Partnership (with support from Kings’ Patient Safety and Service Quality Centre) has written ‘The Healthy NHS Board; Principles for Good Governance’. This guidance identifies a set of evidence-based, durable principles for good governance that can be applied in any policy and organisational environment.
These key principles are expressed in the ‘Role of the Board’ model that is the centrepiece of the guidance.
But guidance on its own is seldom enough. To strengthen NHS boards , Foresight Partnership has also developed a Board Health Review process. Aligned to the principles in ‘The Healthy NHS Board’ the process shows you how your board is performing. More importantly, it enables you to identify the specific development actions that will improve your effectiveness.
The Board Health Review consists of three on-line assessments:
• Whole Board Assessment – the board assesses itself against core elements and best practice.
• Stakeholder Survey – internal and external perspectives on how the board is performing.
• Individual 360° Survey for board directors – feedback for individual board directors from colleagues on their individual performance in their corporate board role.
Assessment tools are calibrated differently for Foundation Trusts, Aspirant Foundation Trusts, Primary Care Trusts and emergent commissioning organisations. They are confidential, and are offered alongside expert organisational development consultancy to support your board in interpreting the survey results and identifying realistic actions and plans for improvement.
What does ‘Board Health Review’ offer my Board?
Our Board Health Review offers access to specialist assessment tools operated by skilled and experienced organisational development experts to help your board make the best use of the guidance in the Healthy NHS Board. We know that our tools :
• Provide both subjective and objective views of the Board’s performance, from within and without. This provides a comprehensive and informed starting point for development.
• Enable a focus on both business and behavioural objectives. This allows the Board to improve its grip on strategy and accountability whilst exemplifying the culture and behaviours in the board that it wishes to promote in the organisation.
• Support improvement of the board as a whole and the development of individual board members.
Validity of the Board Health Review
We have based the development of our Board Health Review on rigorous research about governance effectiveness in both the public and private sectors – within and outside of healthcare and in the United Kingdom and beyond. The tools have been extensively tested throughout the NHS, with support from NHS East of England. They have now been used and tested in more than 35 boards across the country.
Cost Effective & Flexible Options
Foresight Partnership is committed to offering high quality, keenly priced support to boards. We are happy to work with you to agree how you can best combine and use the assessment tools within the Board Health Review suite to meet your needs and your budget.
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Adrienne Fresko:
Main office: +44 (0)20 7378 0935
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Sue Rubenstein:
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