The Centre for Leadership held its annual conference recently with the theme of Leading with compassion and delivering high quality services. Clearly this is a very timely theme in light of the recent Francis Report which advocated leadership training for all NHS staff directly involved in the care of the public.

Elaine Brookes, Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Health and Wellbeing opened the event, stressing the commitment that the Centre and Faculty has to provide high-quality leadership development across the NHS workforce. Some interesting and provocative keynote speeches then ensued.

Renata Drinkwater from the Expert Patient Programme stressed the need for service users to be involved in healthcare at many levels to drive forward patient-centred values as advocated in the Francis Report, whilst Jan Sobieraj – Director of the newly-formed national NHS Leadership Academy – outlined his vision for leadership and the common role that compassion has to play if we are to develop an NHS to be proud off for the foreseeable future.

The final keynote of the Conference came from Chris Low, the newly-appointed Director of Centres (Centre for Leadership and postgraduate medical education at SHU). Chris defined his vision for leading innovation and becoming more entrepreneurial in health and social care and outlined how the Centre for Leadership can contribute to this exciting agenda.

In summary, this was a very challenging and stimulating Conference in which the role of the compassionate leader has become pivotal to delivering successful healthcare and quality services to all.