Have I Got a PhD for You!

Abstract

One’s own story, and that of others, frames our cultural conversations. Shaped as they are by geography, history and personal origins, individuality and diversity is expected and normal. It is when one seeks to tie these disparate threads into a single cord to pull everyone along in the same direction, that challenges arise. Institutional change, particularly across nonaligned subcultures in organisations, suffers from this lack of coherence in direction, signalled, in my view, through their lack of a shared overarching story and narrative arc. My work seeks to demonstrate how applying such principles to the leadership of skin health pathways in an Island setting, literally ‘getting under the skin’ of the stories each subculture told itself and each other, and the lessons I learned from enculturating myself into these communities, enriches and informs the knowledge base of delivering institutional change in favour of those in the frontline, the closest to the patient for whom we all work.