Despite the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement facing the axe in 2012, Sue Mortlock, its head of board development, is optimistic that its work on internal coaching and internal coach supervision will continue across the NHS.
Mortlock said: “We feel we’ve done too much to let it slip. We need to look at where coaching will sit in the next structure, where it can be championed across the service when the national and strategic health authorities have disappeared. I’m optimistic there will be a home for this.”
The shake-up will mean the national and regional leads that the NHS Institute provides will be taken away, said Mortlock. The challenge will be how to embed and grow the work locally, she told Coaching at Work.
Gil Schwenk, principal consultant at Bath Consultancy Group, which worked with the NHS Institute on its internal coach supervision programme, said: “The restructure would negatively impact return on investment if the infrastructure to support coaching across the NHS were dismantled by organisational change and cuts.”
Mortlock stressed that coaching and coach supervision will be more vital now than ever before: “We recognise that coaching is fundamental for supporting the reconfiguration of the NHS. And coaching should go hand in hand with supervision.”
She continued: “The real tragedy for us is that we’d just commissioned an evaluation and we were really excited because we’d got more rigour around evaluating the coaching. We didn’t know of anyone doing it quite as thoroughly as we were so its bad timing. There’s the challenge of having to work through this and we’ve got new people to educate but I remain optimistic that we will work through it.
“I genuinely feel that so much on this agenda has been done. What we’re saying to colleagues who are in a position to commission coaching is that we’ve looked at this and we believe we will be inputting into new coaching relationships in the New Year.”
She was hoping for confirmation of funding for a third cohort of internal coach supervisors to go ahead in March 2011. The NHS Institute launched an internal coach supervisor development programme last year (see feature, ‘The Best of Health).