Embedding leadership into regulatory, educational and professional standards.

This is a time of significant change in health and care services in the UK, in which unprecedented power and responsibility are being devolved to clinicians. To enable this change to successfully take place and support clinicians and the wider workforce in this very important role we will need to further develop leadership capability within the system. Achieving this goal means working with the various professional, regulatory and educational bodies to ensure their standards and guidance align and describe leadership. To support this action and ensure this is done in a consistent way, the Secretary of State launched the Leadership Framework (LF) in June 2011. This is the first time that there has been a single agreed standard that provides a common understanding of leadership and a consistent approach to leadership development that spans all clinical professions, the educational and regulatory sectors and aligns with those in the NHS. A key component of the Leadership Framework is the Clinical Leadership Competency Framework (CLCF). The CLCF describes the leadership competences that clinicians need to become more actively involved in the planning, delivery and transformation of health services and has been agreed by all of the key regulatory, professional and educational bodies and is being widely adopted throughout healthcare. The CLCF has been adopted through consultation with a wide cross-section of staff, patients, professional bodies and academics, and with the input of all the clinical professional bodies and has the support of the chief professions officers, the professional advisory boards, the representative education bodies and the Department of Health. This paper reports on progress to embed the CLCF into the various professional, regulatory and educational standards and curricula. It builds on an earlier paper in this journal that provided us with a substantial evidence base in which to understand progress. Given that the framework, tools and resources have only been available since July 2011 the extent of embedding, high level of awareness and excellent examples of adoption are quite impressive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]