Celebrating nursing across the capital
Oliver Shanley, Chief Nurse for London, shares an update from the London Nursing Leadership Forum
Already this year we have has seen many important developments to support a strong, engaged and happy nurse workforce in London.
In January, I was fortunate to speak to many of London’s nurse leaders at the launch of two exciting new products — both of which are a first for London — that will enable better retention and career progression for nurses in the capital.
1) The CapitalNurse Digital Career Framework: a free-to-use digital career tool for all nurses, designed to advance a London-wide approach to career progression. It enables nurses to reflect on their practice, receive and review feedback from peers and service users and have a structured career conversation with a facilitator.
2) The CapitalNurse/HEE Preceptorship Framework: co-designed by nurses across London and standardised using best practice, the framework can support newly registered nurses in any health and social care organisation across London in their transition from student nurse to registered practitioner
Like the rest of the country, in London it is a challenge to retain our nurses. By developing and implementing a pan-London approach to career progression we are offering a tool which can be used to encourage nurses and their employers create career developments one to opportunities which means they are more likely to remain in London within their places of work, progress in their careers, have greater levels of job satisfaction and feel more positive and valued in the workplace.
CapitalNurse belongs to all of London’s nurses. I am excited about these new frameworks and how they will support our nurses, so please make if you are a nurse you sign up and use them.
I’m also delighted to tell you about the work we celebrated at the Pre Chief Nursing Officer Summit event in London on Tuesday 23 January. This was the fourth regional event and we welcomed over 100 of the Capital’s nurse leaders to thank them, describe our plans for nursing in the Capital and hear from some insightful speakers. The day was introduced by responding to the conversation about nursing in London that commenced in October.
The areas that many of you identified that we needed to address across London included workforce, leadership, resilience and mental health and we reflected that feedback in the day’s speakers
I was fortunate to introduce Professor Michael West, from the Kings Fund and Lancaster University first on stage to speak about the importance of creating cultures of leadership and compassion and the effectiveness of an engaged, valued workforce. Michael talked through five points to creating NHS cultures for high quality care; an inspirational vision, clearly aligned goals, good people management, continuous learning and enthusiastic team working.
Next on stage was Professor Jane Cummings, Chief Nursing Officer for England and Regional Director for London. Jane discussed how self-care and resilience are vital for the capital’s nurse leaders who are important to leading the way to making changes happen. The five national CNO priorities for action covering changing populations, technology, workforce, resources and the image of midwifery and nursing were discussed alongside winter pressures, flu and better use of care homes.
We then heard from the enthusiastic Professor Janice Sigsworth, Director of Nursing at Imperial, who shared Imperial’s digital innovations across four sites whilst putting patients first. The programme implemented 80 devises supporting 243 beds, and releasing 16,000 hours of nursing time for care from manually documenting records.
Deborah Sanders, Chief Nurse from the Royal Free, then shared the work carried out with Google’s DeepMind to create an app that is revolutionary in helping treat patients and save lives by putting vital patient information in one place. It’s incredible to imagine that in one day the system analysed 2,211 blood tests, identifying 66 changes in kidney function, leading to 23 alerts issued and 11 cases acted upon.
Mandy Stevens, from Expert by experience, shared her mental health journey from Director of Nursing, to in-patient and recovery. Mandy’s empowering talk discussed the impact of her mental illness on her health and the role we all have in ensuring our colleagues know its ok not to be ok which led all in the room to give Mandy a standing ovation.
Jonathan Sanger, Co-founder of Raise the Bar discussed how attitude is key to achieving quality and high standards. The five top tips we all took away were to set goals, have a passion to achieve them, have a plan, reactively respond to challenges and take proactive actions.
Dr Ruth may, Executive Director of Nursing at /NHS Improvement spoke about what improvement means across the healthcare system. Leadership, engagement and QI methodologies were discussed alongside the national priorities of maternity and neonatal safety, mental health and workforce growth whilst demand has increased requiring investment in retaining nurses.
Our last speaker was Lisa Bayliss Pratt, Chief Nurse and Interim Regional Director (London and South East) from HEE who talked through the extensive work underway which follow six principles: securing supply of staff needed by the health and care system; training, education and investing in workforce; providing broad career pathways for staff; widening participation in NHS jobs; ensuring NHS and all system employers are model employers and ensuring financial and workforce planning are aligned.
I’d like to thank all nurses and midwives for their continued hard work and compassion.
Professor Oliver Shanley OBE
Oliver took up post as Regional Chief Nurse for NHS England and NHS Improvement in December 2016.
Previously to that Oliver was Deputy Chief Executive and Chief Nurse at Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (HPFT) for seven years.
Oliver worked in Mental Health Services since 1987, qualifying as a Mental Health Nurse in 1990. He has worked clinically in a variety of mental health settings, predominately in Forensic services. After working at all clinical nursing grades from Staff Nurse to Senior Nurse Specialist, he commenced work in management.
He has worked at Executive Nurse level since 2003. Oliver is involved at a national and regional level in a number of areas including both safe staffing and safer systems work.
Oliver attained a Doctorate at Kings College London in 2012 and was appointed a Visiting Professor at the University of Hertfordshire in 2014.
In the 2016 New Year’s Honours List Oliver was awarded an OBE for services to Mental Health and Learning Disabilities Nursing.
