Dr Jamie Wyllie Director of Clinical Transformation

About me

Jamie is a GenerationQ Fellow and Director of Clinical Transformation at HealthEast, the clinical commissioning group (CCG) for Great Yarmouth and Waveney.

He completed his medical degree at the University of Edinburgh in 1997 and went on to train in general practice. In 2002 he became at a partner at a GP surgery in Great Yarmouth and also gained membership of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

In 2009, Jamie spent six months as Chair of the Clinical Executive Committee for Great Yarmouth and Waveney Primary Care Trust (PCT). This experience led him to decide to step down from his GP partnership and focus on clinical leadership, as the PCT’s Medical Director.

He spent a year in this role before taking up his current responsibilities at HealthEast in 2011. He continues to practice as a GP one day a week.

For Jamie, GenerationQ has been a journey that’s helped him to understand his approach to leadership and how he can adapt his style to suit different situations and environments. 'I think the biggest insight I gained is about the importance of focusing on relationships. In the NHS there’s sometimes a tendency to try to use contracts to drive change. This doesn’t work, because change has to be initiated and led by people. The emphasis needs to be on conversations between people who want to improve things for patients.'

Jamie found the site visits to companies such as Unipart and organisations such as Bolton Royal Infirmary particularly valuable. 'I took a lot of inspiration from being able to study the ways other organisations approach quality improvement and how they achieve and sustain change. It made me think about the work I do in a different way. After visiting Bolton Royal Infirmary, I recall wishing that we had a resource like their improvement team; then I realised that the clinical transformation team could be just that – we just needed to change our approach and think about our roles in a different way.

'As a team, we’re shifting our focus onto improvement and trying to work in a much more connected way. Our approach to project management is becoming less about action plans and timelines, and more about the conversations we need to have. We’re developing a shared narrative, which is about asking: "What is the work we are doing together?" That’s the question I want to be constantly on our minds.'