Tamsin Hooton Director of Service Redesign and Integration

About me

Tamsin is a GenerationQ Fellow and Director of Service Redesign and Integration at Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Alliance.

Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Alliance is a collaborative partnership of commissioners and health care providers, formed to deliver better value, better quality elective care pathways. The Alliance is an innovative approach to contracting for care, designed to support rapid transformation and improvements to care, with an eye on supporting the financial sustainability of the local health system. 

Tamsin has over 20 years’ experience in the NHS, having joined the NHS Graduate Finance Training Scheme after completing a degree in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She has worked in a number of senior strategic commissioning roles.

At the time of her fellowship, Tamsin was Director of Service Redesign at NHS Southwark Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG). Her responsibilities include strategic commissioning, supporting the development of clinically-led commissioning, delivering Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention (QIPP) workstreams and improving health outcomes. She led on quality across the CCG.

In Tamsin’s experience, many management courses are good at providing theoretical knowledge, but that knowledge often fails to translate into behavioural change in the workplace. 'GenerationQ is really very different on this front. It gives you a rigorous academic understanding of leadership and quality improvement, and it also encourages and supports you to experiment with new ideas and approaches in your day to day work. The loop is completed when you talk through and reflect on your experiences with your coach and peers on the programme.'

Tamsin says that many of things she’s learnt through GenerationQ have quickly become embedded in her working practices. 'I now place more emphasis on developing relationships within my organisation and also outside of it – something that’s very important to my work on developing an integrated approach to care across our area. And there’s been a shift in the type of conversations I have with people about change and improvement, with a great deal more positive dialogue.'

The idea that organisations are complex and that change can’t be orchestrated by managers made a particular impression on Tamsin. 'In the past I might have given myself a hard time if change wasn’t progressing in the way I wanted it to. But I now understand that there are many people and factors that influence change, and that it is likely to happen in an emergent way rather than a linear one. It’s liberating to feel that if you end up taking a more circuitous route to get from A to B, it doesn’t equal failure.'

‘Generation Q really opened my eyes to a different way of leading change and was unlike any other management/leadership development course I’d ever been on. I am now much more reliant on dialogue, building influential relationships and gaining people’s commitment to change.’