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Biography
Tom is a consultant in prehospital care at Bart’s Health and consultant in intensive care medicine at King’s College Hospital. He trained predominantly in Greater Manchester before undertaking a secondment to London’s Air Ambulance in 2008. He is the medical director of London’s Air Ambulance.
First and foremost, are there any key leadership messages you want to get out to our readership?
I think something that has served me well is the idea of positive regard, the assumption of positive intent. This particularly holds during a difficult period where people are under significant stress and strain and we don’t always know what’s going on for people in the other facet of their lives. This involves looking at behaviours or issues that are raised and asking yourself ‘what's the most positive possible explanation for this?’ and then assuming that’s the case. Then you can explore it with them if you need to, rather than thinking ‘They’re a problem and they need to do what they’re told.’ That is something that has been useful for me during this…because it’s all very easy to say ‘don’t overreact and keep calm,’ but actually, what’s the intellectual underpinning for that? One intellectual underpinning is you can’t possibly know all of the what’s going on in someone’s head. You can’t possibly know all the things that are relevant for that person. Everyone sees this as a major challenge we’re all trying to do what we think is the right thing. Let’s work with that as an assumption, that this makes sense for that person and that they think this is a helpful and positive contribution that they’re making.
Tell us a little bit about your leadership role and how it is changing as a result of the pandemic.
I started a new leadership role as the medical director for the air ambulance in January. I had a couple of months in the early phases of the role and I was busy doing the initial engaging and meeting people and building a team. Then …
Footnotes
Contributors TH, the interviewee, was responsible for the main content that was written up. AN interviewed TH, and used his words to craft the written interview.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement No data are available.