Evaluating your progress

The Health Foundation has developed a range of leadership schemes that aim to support quality improvement in the health sector. Leadership development involves award holders embarking on a journey of change, not only for themselves, but also for those around them – and for their organisation. This handbook will support you in assessing the impact of the leadership scheme as it progresses. We suggest that you consider it as a support for self-evaluation, so that when you come to complete the required end-of-award report, you will have plenty of evidence to draw on.

Self-evaluation is important to leadership. Taking time to examine your wishes, fears, thoughts, questions and motivation can lead to deeper levels of understanding and insight. Similarly, self-evaluation involves reflecting on the information you have gathered, and using it to enhance your understanding and gain greater insight into your work, your development as a leader and the impact this has on the people with, and for whom, you work.

Self-evaluation fits in with the wider policy environment, which emphasises the need for continual improvement and monitoring of quality services. Indeed, systems are already in place, such as audit, risk management, clinical effectiveness and complaints management, that link directly to the practice of evaluating performance and development.

Your self-evaluation will support The Health Foundation’s comprehensive evaluation of its leadership programme. Your end-of-award report will add to the data collected by our evaluation team, which will make our evaluation findings more robust. Your report will also contribute to our learning about leadership development, and to the impact of our leadership programme on quality improvement across the UK, as well as to our ability to share learning with others. It will also help improve the programme for cohorts of award holders in the future.

This handbook aims to get you started. It explains the areas you should cover and includes tips and techniques that will help you to collect the information required in your end-of-award report. We suggest some further reading, should you wish to explore any areas in more depth. Examples of completed end-of-award reports are available on our website. These examples are intended to give you pointers and ideas for what you are aiming to achieve.

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