You evaluate your personal effectiveness, leadership and management capabilities and develop an action plan to meet your learning needs.

You are introduced to concepts associated with culture and strategy within organisational contexts. Consider the nature of working across public and private sector, exploring organisational performance, and focusing on the impact of different leadership strategies that influence organisational culture. You engage with policy and legislative frameworks relevant this and the role of monitoring performance. Identify how culture influences overall performance, applying key policies, theories and frameworks, and critically evaluate the effectiveness of your organisation’s performance.

Learn to lead and manage improvement within a health or social care context. Develop your knowledge and understanding of tools, techniques and approaches to effectively plan and lead improvement and strategic change. Gain an understanding of the human dimension of change, consider why change can falter or fail, and examine the skills, behaviours and approaches to manage it. Write a management report outlining your strategy to lead change, considering the complexity within your organisation, how to lead ethically and how manage the human dimensions of any change project.

You explore organisational issues such as culture, business modelling and risk management strategies, and the impact that has on staff engagement, wellbeing and performance. Create a robust proposal on how you would use your leadership and strategic oversight to address key issues from a failing organisation. You arrange to meet with a panel of peers from your organisation.

Prepare for your dissertation project at master’s level. You develop your ability to design an ethical research project that could contribute to the evidence base of your profession. You gain the necessary knowledge and skills to design research relevant to your practice, including primary research, systematic reviews, audit and evaluation. You are equipped with the ability to negotiate ethical approval processes and complete documentation that allows you to gain ethical approval. Develop skills in producing focused questions, searching academic databases, designing sampling, data collection and data analysis/synthesis methods, evaluating research and the principles and practices of ethical research design.

You complete a practice-based project or systematic review. The practice-based project allows you to explore an area of your professional practice and implement and evaluate a change, or propose how you could do so in practice. You demonstrate advanced capabilities in literature retrieval and critical appraisal, to develop your knowledge and understanding in a topic related to your professional practice. Produce a 4,000-word journal article-style submission and a poster presentation, preparing you for writing for publication and presentation at conferences.