Background
Lesley has a wealth of NHS director experience from leadership roles in acute, teaching, mental health, and regulatory organisations. Her director portfolios have included operations, planning and performance, strategy and quality and financial improvement (she is a qualified accountant). Consequently, Lesley understands the challenges and pressures of the responsibility for upholding standards that rests with the Board, and between managers and clinical professionals.
Lesley uses her experience to help new leadership teams successfully recognise and navigate the sometimes competing and contradictory political and regulatory demands driving system policies. Lesley’s collaborative approach to team working focuses on encouraging all partners to review their processes and share their experiences honestly with each other. She enjoys using qualitative and quantitative data sets to move teams beyond reliance on anecdote into analysis, to challenge orthodox thinking and create a sustained momentum for change.
Lesley recently completed a Masters at UCL affording her a new lens through which to view NHS policy and practice. Lesley’s dissertation “the harm in healing” exploring the moral injury of doctors, enabled her to examine one of the oft-cited drivers of low morale in the NHS, considering where moral injury sits on the continuum of workplace psychological harms, its causes, and possible mitigations at the system, organisational and team levels.