For six months Sir Gerry Robinson cast his expert business eye over Rotherham General Hospital, dissecting the problems of the NHS for a television series. He pinpointed a “them and us” attitude that can keep medics and managers either side of a deep divide, where the losers are the patients. “I was surprised,” he says, “that most of the time there was almost no meaningful communication between the medics and managers.”

But the NHS is celebrating its 60th birthday and with age comes wisdom. Increasingly healthcare staff acknowlege the need to understand the process of management, and some even cross the divide.

Julie Gillson, lead nurse at Newcastle General Hospital’s walk-in centre, decided that if you cannot beat them at least understand what they are talking about. “In meetings with managers I didn’t understand the business issues. I realised I needed to learn the jargon,” she says.

An MBA at Newcastle Business School has helped her to recognise management styles and techniques. “I’m now much more confident when working with managers, and being able to use their terminology has improved my credibility.”

Examiners call in FBI to crackdown on cheats

Thousands of students are caught up in a probe into websites that reveal GMAT questions

BACKGROUND

• Time to take a moral lead

• The cold, hard facts about global warming

• Teacher's mission

• All in the big-money game

BACKGROUND

• Credit crunch refugees fuel record demand

• Find the silver lining

• Doctors look for words to help NHS recuperate

• Russia’s lessons in capitalism

Dr Alistair Baker, consultant paediatrician at King’s College Hospital, London, says: “Doctors and managers don’t understand each other’s point of view, and medical staff feel power is transferring to management. Sometimes it seems the NHS puts staff first and patients second, so to ensure the patient’s interests medics must at least speak the management language.” Baker began an executive MBA at ESCP-EAP European School of Management (Paris) last December.

“I had done a lot of management work but wanted a qualification that would be respected by medical colleagues and managers. I realised that my view was limited by the perspective of the NHS and needed to see what management was about elsewhere. It has hugely changed the way I think and work. I now measure everything – when I go to work and go home and how I spend my time.”

Stephen Diacon, director of the MBA programme at Nottingham University Business School, which offers an MBA tailored for the healthcare sector, says: “Healthcare is a challenging environment, especially for doctors who have to juggle a complex portfolio of managing budgets, people and risk. Our MBA is designed to help healthcare professionals to develop their management and leadership skills.”

Gillson would like to see management on the curriculum for all healthcare professionals. She says: “There is nothing in nurses’ training about how to manage. I know that having an MBA has made a big difference in my job applications and caught the attention of the senior consultants and general managers who have interviewed me.” She is about to become chief matron in charge of a team within Northumbria Healthcare.

“In the past decade the NHS has moved to being run as a business and medical staff need to understand how things work. Senior medical people can no longer say, ‘My patient needs this, I don’t care how we get it’. We need to know what things actually cost, and have to understand customer service, strategy and finance.”

The theatre sister who stepped over to the ‘dark side’

When Lynn Davies moved from nursing into healthcare management in the 1980s a doctor remarked “You’re not a nurse now, you’re stepping over to the dark side.” That, she says, sums up how medical staff then saw managers.

Davies qualified as a nurse in 1973. Now the manager for clinical support services at Birmingham Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, she has seen the introduction of an NHS management layer and the recognition that medical people also need to manage.

“As a theatre sister I did basic courses on budgeting and staff management, then took the Certificate of Health Service Management. After 16 years working in the operating theatre the post of theatre manager became vacant. Rather than someone coming in to tell me what I already knew I decided to do it myself.

“My line manager suggested that I should consider doing an MBA, but it wasn’t till 2001 that I decided to go ahead. I chose the Open University Business School programme.

“I took the finance module because I’m responsible for a budget of £22 million. Now I make sure all my managers who have budgets spend time with the finance department. Management training – perhaps a mini-MBA – should be part of every clinical person’s development.”