A medical educationalist with over 20 years in senior leadership roles in teaching and research, Lesley Hughes has worked with multiple stakeholders in various organisations including the NHS, Primary Care, and Higher Education.
Most of Lesley’s leadership experience involved developing partnerships, establishing shared agreement around policy and process, and implementing change to educational programmes and clinical practice that would serve to improve communication and engagement in multidisciplinary teamworking. Her experience includes ensuring academic policy aligns to health professional regulatory guidelines and assessment. Key to increasing quality in teaching and learning has been building effective relationships, understanding and appreciating similarities and differences, resolving conflict, and strengthening resilience.
Lesley also formed part of the WHO working group responsible for developing framework for action on interprofessional education and collaborative practice.
As part of her leadership roles, Lesley conducted research into the resistance of stakeholders to change, identifying barriers and mitigating factors that hinder development. This enabled Lesley to get more involved in building relationships with stakeholders to promote engagement and empowerment, key drivers in resolving conflict and generating partnerships.
Lesley has found that embracing confrontation as a means to acknowledge differences and uncertainty can create opportunities for clarification and correcting misinterpretation, if done so in a facilitated way. She uses this approach in her work. As academic lead for interprofessional education, which formed part of the transformation in medical education, Lesley understood the need to create a shared strategy for working across departments and professions meant negotiation was a key part in changing curriculum, clinical practice and assessment. In a nutshell, Lesley creates change to improve listening skills, communication, problem solving, and the respect of differences in roles and responsibilities to improve teamwork.
As a trained mediator, Lesley continues this work with organisations, especially multidisciplinary sectors. Her specialism is workplace mediation; this covers a range of issues including dysfunctional teams, workforce complaints, departmental or system conflict. Working with the TCM group has provided Lesley with additional skills including use of the Resolution Framework™️.
