Introduction As three national medical directors’ clinical fellows 2023/24, we have a unified goal: to become better clinical leaders. The fellowship is managed by the Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management (FMLM), and we started our year of dedicated leadership and management learning in September 2023; all placed at the United Kingdom Health Security Agency (UKHSA). Each of us, having worked in the National Health Service (NHS), understands that effective medical leadership benefits the patient, the workforce and the healthcare organisation.

The evidence base is calling out for better medical leadership. We aspire to be effective clinical leaders of the future and wanted to create an educational resource to share our learning and document our fellowship year.

Aims and objectives of the research project or activity As NHS training doctors we are acutely aware of the difficulty of developing leadership skills on the clinical frontline. All of us listen to podcasts as an educational resource in our medical careers but realised that there is a paucity of educational leadership podcasts particularly for aspiring leaders.

Our aim is to create an educational podcast, to document and share our experiences of learning about leadership through reflective discussion. Through our recorded conversations amongst ourselves and guests we want to find out what makes a successful leader and what we can do to become one. Our target audience is aspiring leaders, like ourselves, both from a clinical and non-clinical backgrounds.

Method or approach Following a brainstorming session between the three of us in September 2023, we undertook a due diligence exercise into the practicalities of creating, structuring and establishing audience engagement for a podcast. This was followed by engagement meetings with those with podcast experience and stakeholders to the project including FMLM and UKHSA. The discussion structure was formulated to focus each podcast on a recent learning experience that one of us had had. A pilot episode was recorded in October 2023. The initial podcasts have centered around a learning point prompting reflective conversation and our intention is to invite guest speakers for future episodes.

Findings A pilot episode and 2 following episodes have now been recorded. The project has been a fascinating way of tracking our leadership development. Within a few recordings our observational findings are of change in language to reflect the organisational and business structure we have been exposed to. We have all reflected on leading projects, chairing meetings; comparing similarities and sharing learning points. Our learning has been supported by the formal leadership core study days facilitated by the FMLM team which have also influenced our podcast discussions. We plan to collect audience and stakeholder feedback on the podcast in early 2024 as well as evaluate our experience of creating a podcast and analyse this qualitative data.

Key messages

• The evidence base is calling out for better medical leadership.

• Leadership skills are difficult to develop on the clinical frontline, particularly at postgraduate level.

• Podcasts are a popular, colloquial educational resource.

• There is a paucity of educational leadership resources including podcasts for aspiring clinical and non-clinical leaders.

• The ‘Make me a Leader’ podcast aims to address this.

• The podcast series covers leadership lessons learnt by the podcast presenters; three National Medical Director’s clinical fellows 2023/24.

• A pilot episode and 2 following episodes have been recorded.

• Podcast episodes are based on the experiential learning of the clinical fellows in their roles at the UKHSA.

• Data analysis of audience, stakeholder and presenter feedback is planned.