Kate Hooton Assistant Director for Quality and Patient Safety

About me

Kate is a GenerationQ Fellow and Assistant Director for Quality and Patient Safety at Aneurin Bevan Health Board.

At the time of her fellowship, Kate was the Assistant Director of Quality and Patient Safety at Aneurin Bevan Health Board (ABHB). She was responsible for a number of quality and patient safety initiatives within the organisation and works as part of the Aneurin Bevan Centre for Improvement.

Kate began her career in NHS management in 1984, after graduating from the University of Cambridge with a degree in natural sciences. Before taking up her current post, Kate was Associate Director for Clinical Governance at Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust, which now forms part of ABHB.

Her experience of large-scale improvement projects includes leading the Safer Patients Initiative 2 at Gwent Healthcare and the 1000 Lives Plus campaign at ABHB.

She obtained an MBA in health care in 1995 and a diploma in systems thinking in 2005.

Kate says that GenerationQ prompted her to take a more disciplined approach to reflecting on her leadership practice. 'The programme encouraged me to delve deeper into areas I’d perhaps avoided thinking too much about it before. Working through the slightly more painful areas where you don’t perform so well is what enables you to grow and develop as a leader. I learnt to recognise patterns in my behaviour, which means I can now pause and make a choice about what to do.'

The programme also influenced Kate’s understanding of the NHS as an organisation and her role within it. 'I’ve always seen the NHS as a rather large, bureaucratic machine. There’s certainly some truth in that image, but I now see the NHS as much more the sum of all of the people within it and the conversations they have. This works on an organisational level too. So a big part of my role is to start conversations about quality and safety improvement with operational managers, to work towards it becoming part of everyone’s job.'

She adds that one approach to leadership that made a big impression on her is that of the ‘servant leader’. 'Leadership is conventionally seen as controlling things from the top of an organisation. But the servant leadership approach is about handing power over to people working at an operational level, and supporting them to become leaders themselves. There’ll always be areas of our work that are shaped by national government policy, but I can work with divisions to make sure that we implement this work in a way that aligns with their goals.'