NHS Northern, Eastern and Western Devon Clinical Commissioning Group - Embedding a culture of coaching

NEW Devon CCG is a real believer in the use of coaching to help achieve what we have set out to do. Coaching enables us to have empowering conversations with colleagues, patients, partners and providers, focusing on strengths and challenging behaviours in a constructive and meaningful way.

For us, it is a fundamental part of building effective relationships for ‘success’ across Devon. We have an excellent history of developing coaches, inherited from primary care organisations, and a leadership team committed to seeing this work.

We also benefit from NHS Leadership South West, an organisation that wants to see coaching cultures developing across the NHS system. NEW Devon CCG has recently run a series of coaching master classes for existing coaches.

This programme also included 2 representatives from Devon County Council, as an initial look at shared development programmes with partners. This has resulted in benefits back to the CCG, including the development of tools for learning needs analysis and access to a shared training directory.

Staff at NEW Devon CCG are working with Plymouth Hospitals and Plymouth City Council, to develop coaching supervisory frameworks to enable the development of a register of coaches across the public sector. We have also been discussing sharing coaches with Devon Partnership Trust.

Staff at NEW Devon CCG have also benefitted recently from coaching programmes that have been developed by NHS Leadership South West. There are approx. 30 colleagues at NEW Devon CCG who have been through a coaching programme and have registered an interest in coaching others.

We are currently drafting a framework to support the supervision of coaches, to enable our coaches to feel that they are supported and are practising ‘safely’. The principles of coaching conversations have been used to construct new development tools at NEW Devon CCG, including our appraisal system and 360-degree feedback tool.

There are 2 areas (‘’Lots’’) of focus as part of this requirement. Bidders may select to bid for one or both lots.