Evaluation of a primary care triumvirate leadership development programme

Abstract

This article reports on triumvirate leadership development from the perspective of multiple stakeholder participant groups. These groups include the general practice nurse as well as general practitioner, practice manager, programme team and practice colleagues. It provides recommendations for future primary care triumvirate healthcare leadership development. Kirkpatrick’s (1983) four steps were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach. This is the standard model used to demonstrate the value of training across the organisation. Data were collected through individual and focus group interviews, and thematic analysis was used to generate themes relating to the four levels. Findings show that adopting a primary care triumvirate leadership approach provides a promising platform for putting the contemporary collective and distributed approaches to leadership development into operation.

Recommendations include how the nurse should be a legitimate triumvirate member, encouraged to develop leadership capability beyond the duration of the programme. Future programmes could benefit by adopting a multidimensional leadership development model. This would expose the primary care triumvirate leader to the evidence-based ‘Six Es’ approach to leadership development: evaluate, examine, exposure, education, environment, experience (NHS 2006, Leigh et al 2017).