Thrive Paediatrics - Roadmap for transforming the working lives of paediatricians

The RCPCH Roadmap for transforming the working lives of paediatricians identifies that every healthcare worker, department, organisation, region is at a different place on this journey. It is not for the Thrive Paediatrics team to tell people what is and isn’t important for them. Instead, it is about learning to use the Roadmap as a tool to identify things that might help or hinder local paediatricians from thriving and setting a direction of travel.
Repeated icon of hands holding heart with a medical cross inside

Overview

The Roadmap, which you can download below, is in three main sections, which reflect the themes of the challenges that our workforce is facing:

  1. Working lives - rotas, job plans, induction, leave, etc.
  2. Professional development - education, leadership, CPD, etc.
  3. Wellbeing and culture - support, teamwork, communication, inclusion, etc.

Each section has statements that provide an overview of what good looks like. Statements about best practice can seem dry, or even undesirable additional burdens. The last thing we want to do is to add a burdensome document to your to-do list! And we are convinced that we can only have success if we approach this as a community of paediatricians together, learning from, supporting and (even) inspiring each other.

So we offer these statements tentatively, but hopefully, as a starting point (maybe even a catalyst) for change, and a vision of how things could be.

How to use the document

The Roadmap is not designed to be digested in one go, but instead to be used as a tool to identify themes in your own experiences of working as a paediatrician.

We are equipping paediatricians with the skills to use the Roadmap alongside their personal and collective experiences. By sharing these stories, and identifying themes, paediatricians can then use the relevant Roadmap statements to identify areas where things are going well or instead pick up where energy could be used to make changes. 

If you have any questions on the roadmap, contact us at thrive@rcpch.ac.uk.