Improving health outcomes for black and minority ethnic communities through shared leadership

Abstract

This paper describes a project that moves away from a transactional model of leadership to a shared model of leadership, across health professionals from different organisations, to address health inequalities among deprived black and minority ethnic (BME) communities in Walsall in the West Midlands region of England. Traditional models of leadership can tend to focus on individuals and do not take into account the fact that patient care usually involves a number of staff from several organisations. The project was designed to test the hypotheses that provision of structured support to teams using a shared leadership model would lead to improvements in partnership working and patient outcomes. The project showed significant improvements in partnership working and enabled greater engagement with the BME communities in Walsall. The paper explores the strengths and weakness of the shared leadership model and the challenges in translating the vision into reality.