Largest Partnership of Clinicians in Europe
Circle is an employee co-owned partnership with a social mission
to make healthcare simpler, better and smarter value for patients.
We form the largest partnership of healthcare professionals in
Europe - over 2500. Circle is co-founded, co-run and co-owned
by clinicians. Because the consultants and healthcare
professionals who work for Circle own the facilities they work in,
they are empowered to put patients first in everything that they
do. If you are a Consultant or healthcare professional
interested in joining our partnership, please contact our
Partnership Development Team on 0207 034 5255.
Clinical Leadership
Our founding ethos was that clinicians are best placed to decide
how to achieve the best care for their patients. Because our
credo commits us to being 'above all else the agents of our
patients', all decisions in Circle are based on what's best for our
patients, rather than financial or operational concerns. It seems
obvious: decisions involving patient care should be made by the
people best qualified to deliver that care. Yet in UK healthcare,
this happens surprisingly rarely. In fact, when we developed our
model of clinical leadership in 2004, we were told that the idea of
putting clinicians in charge of hospitals was like 'handing the
keys of the asylum to the interns".
Evidence Base
Since that time, we have made the case for clinical leadership
to NHS management, healthcare opinion formers and politicians of
all shades. Our partnership of over 2000 consultants and
other healthcare professionals have provided thought leadership in
this debate. Perhaps more importantly, our clinically-owned
and managed facilities provide the evidence in this debate.
We invite anyone to visit our facilities to discover how clinical
leadership can drive better patient experience, better clinical
results and smarter value healthcare.
Clinical Circles
Circle hospitals are divided into separate business units, named
clinical circles. Each clinical circle has a lead doctor,
nurse and administrator. Each unit has the freedom and
authority to take all decisions that impact upon patient care in
their unit, and are responsible for their own balance sheet.
In this way, power is devolved to the frontline and decisions are
taken as close as possible to patients. Our success as a
company does not lie in a small group of expert managers at the top
of the company but in a large community of expert innovators at the
grass-roots. In this way, we maximise our effectiveness
footprint, harnessing the collective wisdom of a large group of
people to offer the best possible solutions for our patients.
Clinicians and Managers
Our belief in the power of clinical leadership is backed up by
our management structure. At every level within Circle,
administrative and managerial staff exist to support our clinician
leaders. Departmental managers work alongside the Clinical Lead for
that department. The general manager of each of our hospitals works
with a senior consultant with equal responsibility for that
hospital. This means that those who know patients best are free to
take decisions in their patients' best interests. That's Clinical
Leadership. And we believe it's the best way to run a healthcare
organisation.