This core module is integral to your Postgraduate Certificate programme. You begin the module by taking part in activities that help you become more self-aware of your strengths, areas for improvement, and the skills and knowledge needed for your personal and professional growth. This helps you plan a course of study that aligns with your personal and professional development needs. Throughout the programme, you will receive support from a learning mentor.

After designing and negotiating your programme, this module will support you throughout your learning journey until its completion. The main purpose of the module is to help you learn about learning and develop this important lifelong and work-based skill. This will give you the confidence to critically evaluate and challenge ideas, advocate for your own opinions, and communicate complex ideas to different audiences.

The course considers the changing role of doctors and other clinical leads in relation to leadership and health service improvement. This provides the context for considering the current emphasis on the need for improvement. Topics covered are:

• The evolution of healthcare provision and exemplar models across the globe
• Critical consideration of key concepts in healthcare: The patient journey; Patient-centred health care; Evidence-based improvements; Inter-professional working
• Leading and influencing health service improvement
• Managing the tensions between quality healthcare provision, financial constraints, innovation and risk
• Key organisational and individual challenges for achieving health services improvement.

The topics covered in this module include:

• What is leadership? What is management?
• Leadership and management: current debates and issues in relation to the challenges of your own role
• Social and ethical challenges for management and leadership in changing organisational contexts; managing with integrity
• Organisation culture, values, power – impact on expectations and behaviours of leadership and management
• Understanding your own leadership style, behaviours, habits
• Evaluating your own strengths and development needs in the context of management and leadership
• Developing authentic leadership effectiveness – aligning your approach to fit with current and future organisational needs

This module will help you to understand different perceptions of effective leadership and management and examine the effectiveness of leadership and management in the context of your own organisation. You will be able to devise a strategy for your own personal leadership development to help you address the current challenges of your role.

This module takes you through the process of analysing drivers for change in your own organisation. It will develop your critical understanding of the external and internal factors that influence the need for change in your organisation and your skills in working with the complexity and uncertainty of change.

We will explore the change agenda in your local context and start to question and challenge existing organisational capacity to respond to these.

You will learn to identify your organisation's key internal and external drivers for change. You will be able to analyse how change is affecting your organisation and understand how change impacts you and your role.

Effective collaboration and successful teamwork are key features of successful organisations. This course will develop your critical understanding of the features of "high-performing teams" and your skills working as a team leader or member.

You will explore key concepts, models and theories of team roles and dynamics and relate these to your own experience. You will evaluate frameworks for assessing and developing team performance and consider their usefulness and applicability to your own practice.

We will explore with you the answers to some key questions:

• What is the impact of leadership on the performance and development of teams?
• What leadership skills and strategies are effective?
• What is 'collective leadership'?
• What are the specific challenges of working with inter-agency and inter-professional teams?

You will evaluate ideas, relate them to your situation and develop practical strategies you can adopt at work.

This module will cover:

• Managing people for effective performance through the life cycle of employment
• Managing day-to-day performance
• Dealing with performance issues
• Understanding an individual’s motivation, personality, and behaviours
• Developing appropriate, effective people management responses
• Leading and developing your staff

The module will help you develop an understanding of best practices for managing staff performance and a range of skills to enhance your ability to lead and manage staff routinely. You will increase your understanding of others' behaviours and motivations, explore a range of tactics to engage staff and improve your own ability to manage staff performance.

This module will cover topics including:

• Leadership in times of change
• Transitional to transformational leadership
• Appreciative leadership
• Stakeholder analysis
• Supporting staff in embracing change
• Capacity building to cope with uncertainty
• Achieving sustainable change
• Dealing with resistance to change
• Emotional Intelligence - self and social awareness
• Influencing skills

You will develop your understanding of various approaches to leading others through times of change. You will develop your ability to understand how to engage and influence others and how to take into account different individual’s responses to change. This learning will enhance your capacity to lead and manage people through change.

In this module, you will:

• Develop your knowledge and understanding of a range of strategies through which work-based change may be achieved
• Enhance your ability to select and apply work-based change models to suit your own organisation context
• Explore factors affecting the adoption of change in organisations, including power, ethics, culture and resourcing implications
• Design and plan a change project.

The module covers the following topics:

• History and development of Quality Improvement Science
• Models and techniques for Quality Improvement and Improvement Science
• Policy and context of Quality Improvement in healthcare
• Organisational readiness for Quality Improvement

By the end of the course, you will have developed

• A critical understanding of the role of improvement science in a healthcare context
• Knowledge and understanding of key models related to Quality and Improvement Science
• An understanding of improvement practices in relation to your own organisational role and context.