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Biography
James Mountford is Director of Quality at the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, which has a multiyear programme focused on embedding quality and value improvement into routine practice, reducing unwarranted variation in care delivery and ensuring improvement efforts address what matters to staff as well as patients, families and populations.
James worked initially as an NHS doctor, then in consulting. From 2005 to 2007, he was a Commonwealth Fund/Health Foundation Harkness Fellow based at Massachusetts General Hospital, and at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), both in Boston, USA. Before moving to the Royal Free, James was Director of Quality at UCLPartners, an academic health sciences partnership serving a population of 3 million, in and around London.
He is the editor-in-chief of the journal BMJLeader and sits on the board of AQuA, the improvement partnership based in north-west England. In March 2020 he was seconded to work as the Chief of Quality and Learning at the NHS Nightingale Hospital London, opened in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
First and foremost, are there any key leadership messages you want to get out to our readership?
When a crisis like this happens, it changes the style of leadership that is called for. We need command and control leadership mixed with extreme clarity, kindness and compassion.
It’s also really critical to make sure the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. The temptation is to rush into action, but it’s important to pause first, to define the problem better, to figure out who might have a better solution for it—or may already be solving it—and to communicate the plan well, while appreciating that no plan survives contact with reality.
So this is not the time for ‘heroic’ leaders. At NHS Nightingale London, where I have been seconded to lead the Quality and Learning function, we are developing a philosophy of ‘peloton leadership’, meaning that we all need to …