Dr Bob Price
Dr Bob Price, is Director Postgraduate Awards Advancing Healthcare Practice at the Open University; a flexible, work-based distance learning programme for registered healthcare professionals.
Bob has extensive experience in the teaching of leadership, change agency and practice innovation and has provided consultancy across the UK and beyond in these areas. He writes extensively and practically within professional healthcare journals on the subject of skill enhancement, coaching, mentorship, problem-based learning and related subjects.
With three colleagues, he devised and launched the first ever journal-based enrolled nurse conversion course, Nursing Times Open Learning. In the 1990s he liaised with the Icelandic Nurses Association to deliver the first advanced practice masters degree for nurses in that country, transforming access to reasonably priced, skills-based education there.
Subsequently he led the delivery of a similar programme in the Republic of Ireland that equipped teachers and clinicians to support the new degree level entry registration course for nurses.
Paper summary
It is unrealistic to expect that in the next years ahead, conventional ways of thinking about leadership will equip us to deliver the sort of lean, highly efficient, adversity to opportunity health service required.
Managers will need to select staff with the right skills to lead difficult and unconventional portfolios of work and to develop a wider cadre of those with entrepreneurial potential to carry forward the projects afterwards. We must ask, not what practitioners usually do, but what skills equip key staff to do- irrespective of their traditional professional designations. Job descriptions will be replaced by skill profiles.
To achieve that though, we need to analyse the skills required and to help others to do the same. This paper explores the process of skill analysis and argues that such insights are critical in the face of radical and necessary healthcare change.
Skill analysis helps the health service manager to unlock the potential of a finite human resource- the ‘know-how capital’ of the organisation.
