Guiding principles

As a charity, our guiding principles are:

• Patient benefit: Education and qualifications are without real value unless used for the improvement of patient care. Professional judgement, creativity and innovation are important skills for delivering high quality care. These flourish as clinicians' confidence and competence develops

• Partnership and empowerment: As clinicians' roles and responsibilities continue to adapt and change, so do expectations required of them. Personal and collective responsibility for managing finite resources is critical

• Teamwork: Effective teamwork ensures the best management for patients. Effective personal care considers the whole needs of the patient including colleagues in social care. Preventing ill health across patient populations requires health and social care and public health teams to work closely together to reach shared goals

• Evaluation: Regular reviews of the impact of training on patient care are vital. Improvements in patient care must be measurable. The evidence for education as a lever for service improvement is increasingly robust, but more needs to be done to articulate the business case for quality improvement. This means being clearer about the outputs required of education as an intervention and working strategically to ensure they are achieved, measured and reported

• Communication: Health professionals may know about a disease, its diagnosis and optimal management. However, unless they have the communication skills to help patients to manage themselves, this knowledge has limited value. Understanding and respecting cultural behaviours, as well as other socioeconomic factors, is vital to working effectively with patients, their families and carers. Digital, mobile and social networking are increasingly important as means of delivering and improving clinical practice and reducing the time lag between research findings and patient benefit

• Leadership: Embracing and implementing change where it will benefit patients or healthcare systems is a priority which transcends health services, care pathways and health economies. Leaders at all levels must be strategically ambitious to improve any systems, local or national, where it will benefit patients.