Today has been quite interesting and also fun. A day away from the office, the usual meetings and general issues of managing people is not to be sneezed at, especially if you make sure you don’’t think about what is mounting up for you back at base.

I needed to be in London at the Langham hotel (it wasn’t dark when I was there but it looks very attractive at night don’t you think?) at 9.30, and for once there was a space in the station car park and the train was on time. So far so good I thought. This was my first trip to the capital since the awful events of July 7, and to be honest I haven’’t really wanted to go there until today. I have never been particularly worried about terrorism until now, after all I did my nurse training in London during the height of the IRA bombings (Hyde Park etc.) but maybe I am older and more worldly wise now. It struck me that the tube was less busy at 9am than last time I was there (at the end of June).

Anyway, onto the Langham Hotel which was very plush with a red carpet leading to the door. Once I found my way to the Portland Suite I was met by Jon from Performance Leadership Academy who was running the day and taken to the room where continental breakfast (coffee, juice and pastries) was being served. My fellow participants were as usual mainly women from a variety of backgrounds (nursing, HR, education and training etc). We had an early chat about the state of the NHS and leadership there in.

Basically the company want to sell us a programme for whole organisation leadership / management development. I knew this, and wasn’’t worried about the idea of being lured in by the hotel and food etc, after all this is something we do need; particularly as we are embarking on such wholesale service and organisational redesign. Sorry dropped into some kind of NHS jargon there. The thing I liked was that this is driven by the need to address competencies around communication, people development, relationship management, leadership, standards and accountability, planning and decision making.

One of the most interesting learning points for me, and I do like to learn something, was that for all the differences in funding, the healthcare systems in the US and the UK are not so different. Barbara, who was delivering the session helped us see that the problems we face, for example hospitals and health care providers that spend more than their income, spiralling bank and agency staff costs, falling numbers of nurses and other health care workers are faced on both sides of the Atlantic.

Following a very nice lunch and more networking and chat about healthcare organisation issues we had a short after lunch session during which Barbara went through the issues which led to the Apollo 13 near disaster as an example of innovative working. I will probably cover a bit more about that when I have had time to think more about it. On the way home went up to the Apple shop and exchanged our iPod speakers which had stopped working and headed home. To be home by just after 4pm was something of a treat.