Frequently asked questions.

The Bravest Path delivers evidence-based, courage-building leadership development to NHS staff at every level, from frontline clinicians and ward teams to senior leaders and executives.

We work at scale. Our flagship Braver than Before® programme has reached more than 2,000 NHS participants across multiple cohorts, and our large-scale NHS webinars have collectively reached over 13,000 healthcare professionals. We are the 2025 HSJ Partnership Award winners for Workforce and Wellbeing Initiative of the Year and have been shortlisted by the Nursing Times and HSJ across four award categories for our impact on NHS leadership culture, staff wellbeing, and patient safety.

Our programmes are built specifically for the healthcare context, grounded in research from Brené Brown, Kristin Neff, and Carol Dweck, and designed to address the real pressures NHS staff face: speaking up, managing difficult conversations, and leading with compassion under sustained demand.

Our programmes are designed for NHS staff at all levels and roles, clinical and non-clinical. Braver than Before® is particularly well suited to bands 5 – 8d staff, including nurses, allied health professionals, junior doctors, and team leaders who want to grow their leadership presence and confidence. We also work with senior leaders, executives, and boards through our Braver Teams and The Braver Board® programmes.

We do not deliver generic leadership content. Everything is contextualised for the realities of healthcare: the pressure to conform, the fear of raising concerns, the emotional weight of clinical work, and the complexity of leading in a hierarchical system.

Yes. Our offering spans large-scale webinars (up to 15,000), cohort-based virtual programmes, group coaching, in-person team intensives, digital learning, and keynote events. This lets us reach an entire workforce, thousands of staff, while still building courage and behaviour change at the individual level.

We design system-wide approaches in partnership with Trusts, typically combining a whole-organisation awareness intervention with a deeper cohort programme for identified leaders and a bespoke team or board offer for senior teams.

Psychological safety is the belief that you can speak up, ask questions, raise concerns, or challenge decisions without fear of punishment or humiliation. In healthcare, it is directly linked to patient safety: teams with high psychological safety are more likely to catch errors, escalate concerns early, and raise clinical risks before they cause harm.

The Bravest Path builds psychological safety at the individual, team, and leadership levels. We work on the internal barriers to speaking up, including the nervous system responses that cause people to stay silent — alongside the interpersonal and cultural conditions leaders must create for their teams to feel safe.

Our work is grounded in Amy Edmondson's psychological safety research, Brené Brown's vulnerability and courage frameworks, and Kristin Neff's self-compassion literature.

Speaking up is central to everything we do. Across our programmes, NHS staff learn to recognise why they stay silent, the threat response, the fear of consequences, the imposter syndrome, and to build the practical courage and conversation skills to speak up anyway.

Our Courage to Speak Up module directly addresses the barriers to escalation, the language of brave conversations, and the self-compassion required to recover when speaking up is hard or doesn't go as planned. 91% of Braver than Before® graduates report being more likely to speak up after completing the programme.

This work directly supports Trust-level Freedom to Speak Up strategies and CQC Well-Led domain requirements.

Braver than Before® is a virtual, evidence-based leadership development programme designed specifically for NHS and healthcare professionals. It helps participants speak up with confidence, strengthen self-compassion and wellbeing, and increase engagement and retention.

The programme runs over 4.5 months, is delivered fully online to minimise operational disruption, and provides the equivalent of 30 hours of CPD. It combines live highly participatory group modules, small-group coaching, peer learning circles (Courage Circles), and guided individual reflection.

It is structured around six courage-building modules drawing on Brené Brown's Dare to Lead™ research, Kristin Neff's self-compassion framework, and Carol Dweck's growth mindset work, applied directly to the NHS context.

Yes. We measure participants against the specific behaviours we teach, both before and after the programme, using validated pre- and post-programme assessment.

Across more than 2,000 NHS graduates:

• 91% report being more likely to speak up
• 93% are more likely to practise self-compassion
• 78% feel more engaged at work
• 62% are more likely to stay with their organisation as a result of the programme

These are behavioural outcomes, not satisfaction scores. We also work with Trusts to identify broader organisational metrics, including staff survey trends, retention data, and Freedom to Speak Up referrals, where commissioners want to evidence system-level impact.

Yes. Braver than Before® provides the equivalent of 30 hours of CPD, covering live learning, small-group coaching, peer reflection, and independent study. Participants receive a certificate of completion.

Operational disruption is one of the most significant barriers to NHS staff development, and we have designed our delivery model specifically around this.

Braver than Before® is fully virtual, with live sessions scheduled 3-6 months in advance so rotas can be planned around them. All sessions are recorded and supplementary materials are downloadable, so staff can engage flexibly. Group coaching and Courage Circles are small, time-bounded, and scheduled to accommodate shift patterns.

For team-based work (Braver Teams), we offer a blended model combining virtual sessions with focused in-person intensives. The Braver Board® works primarily in person, typically structured around existing board or leadership team meeting cycles.

BRAVE is our proprietary conversation framework, developed by Bethan Davies, that guides people through high-stakes conversations, whether giving difficult feedback, escalating a patient safety concern, or navigating conflict. In practice, it gives NHS staff a clear, memorable and kind structure for conversations they would otherwise avoid or handle ineffectively.

We work across both the public and private sectors, partnering with organisations that share a commitment to braver, more human leadership cultures.

In the public sector, we have partnered with over 40 NHS Trusts across the UK, spanning acute, mental health, and community settings, as well as local government organisations across the UK.

In the corporate sector, our clients include Microsoft, BP, Barclays, Mars, PayPal, and The Marketing Store.

Yes. Braver than Before® is a cohort-based programme, which means the cost per participant is significantly lower than one-to-one coaching or bespoke in-house design. NHS organisations can commission individual cohort places or block-book cohorts for their staff.

Our virtual delivery model also removes travel, venue, and backfill costs that typically inflate development budgets. For organisations interested in embedding the work at scale, we can discuss tiered pricing, phased rollout, and the use of our digital learning to extend reach further.

Organisations that commission Braver than Before® consistently report measurable, sustainable behavioural change across three areas: individual courage and confidence (including speaking up rates and self-reported wellbeing), team culture (psychological safety, quality of conversations, willingness to challenge), and organisational outcomes (engagement scores, retention indicators, and speaking up culture).

This is not a one-day training event. It is a 4.5-month programme with structured accountability built in, which is why the results hold.

Yes, and we have the alumni data to prove it.

In our post-programme alumni survey two years on from the programme, 96% of graduates report applying their Braver than Before® skills either daily (52%) or weekly (44%).

On lasting impact, 78% say the programme led to lasting changes that are now part of how they work, not a temporary uplift that faded after the programme ended.

The learning also spreads. 81% of alumni report actively sharing or implementing what they learned with others: 70% shared learning informally with colleagues, and 11% say it led to wider changes in their team or service.

This is why we design Braver than Before® the way we do. The 4.5-month structure, the Courage Circles, the accountability between modules is what converts insight into habit. A one-day workshop cannot do this. A programme with built-in practice, reflection, and peer accountability can.

Yes. Alongside our programmes we offer:

• Keynote speaking — our team regularly speak at conferences, leadership events, and away-days on courage, psychological safety, and brave conversations
• Workshops and webinars — standalone sessions on specific topics including speaking up, self-compassion, and managing difficult conversations, scalable to large audiences
• Executive coaching — one-to-one coaching for senior NHS leaders and executives
• Group coaching — for leadership teams or peer cohorts
• The Braver Board® — a bespoke programme for NHS boards and executive teams aligned with the CQC Well-Led measures and governance frameworks

Contact us at info@thebravestpath.com or call +44 (0)1483 363 088 to discuss bringing our work to your organisation, or to reserve places on an upcoming Braver than Before® cohort.