What can NHS leaders learn from the corporate world?

This Insight Report from UCL’s Global Business School for Health highlights how leadership development can accelerate delivery of the Government’s 10-Year Health Plan. Drawing on insights from 500 senior business leaders across the UK, the report identifies lessons from high-performing organisations that can support the NHS in achieving the Plan’s three essential shifts — from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention.

The message is clear: strengthening leadership capability is a critical success factor for this transformation. Business leaders emphasise the value of:

• strong change-management capability and collaborative leadership to address system fragmentation,
• digital confidence and data-driven decision-making, and
• clear accountability and transparent performance cultures.

These capabilities are not about adopting commercial behaviours at the expense of NHS values, but about equipping leaders with the skills and tools needed to steward complex change, improve workforce experience, and enable innovation at scale.

This report encourages NHS organisations, integrated care systems, education partners and government to work together to expand opportunities for leadership development, foster cross-sector learning, and build the confidence and capability required for the next decade of service transformation.

Strengthening leadership is not only a strategic choice — it is a practical enabler of the modern, person-centred, digitally enabled and prevention-focused health service the UK seeks to build.