Darzi fellows at Royal Brompton

It was such a pleasure to meet four of this year's holders of Darzi Fellowships in Clinical Leadership, a program named in honor of Ara Darzi, one of world's leading surgeons at Imperial College London, who also devoted time during his career to the public service, as noted here:

In December 2006 NHS London asked Darzi to "develop a strategy to meet Londoners' health needs over the next five to ten years" and so his report Healthcare for London: A Framework for Action was published on 11 July 2007. Largely implemented, it recommended the development of academic health science centres and the introduction of more primary services in one place: polyclinics. The plan for moving care from hospitals to GP-led polyclinics was largely thwarted by GP opposition, but his call for trauma, acute stroke and heart attack services to be centralised in specialist units achieved was seen as successful and was widely copied.

The fellowship named in his honor:

is one of the most successful clinical leadership development programmes in London, with over 200 Fellowships having been awarded to date. This innovative programme provides a cohort of clinicians, who are typically in the early stages of their career, with a unique opportunity to develop the capability necessary for their future roles as clinical leaders.

Fellowship posts are twelve months in duration and require that time away from normal work or training.  Over that time fellows work on a major project (or in some cases a number of projects) covering service change, quality and safety improvement or leadership capacity building, under the guidance of a nominated sponsor - usually a Medical or Clinical Director or equivalent.

Seen above are the four fellows in residence at Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust, where under the guidance of individual mentors and Dr. Libby Haxby, lead clinician in clinical risk, they are pursuing areas of interest to them and their hospital. They are an impressive group, who will surely be among the clinical leaders of the future.  From the left:

Julian Lentaigne, respiratory and intensive care medicine, whose project is "Improving communication and aftercare on discharge from intenisve care."

Andrea Fischer, pharmacist for critical care, whose project is "IT-system design across the hospital; improving digital care records."

Claire Boynton, anaesthetics and ICU, whose project is: "Customer service improvement in ICUs."

Elsa Ng, pediatric cardiac pharmacy, whose project is "Digital care records: Change management."