Women in healthcare leadership: Harnessing purpose, passion, and perseverance to change health outcomes

Sally Lewis, a General Practitioner (GP) and National Clinical Lead for value-based healthcare (VBHC) in Wales, has spent her career, as part of the women in healthcare leadership, asking questions and paying close attention to the answers so she can better understand how to improve health outcomes and ensure the most impactful use of limited resources. In our third interview of this short series exploring how women in healthcare leadership are changing the face of healthcare, Sally Lewis explains why asking questions and actively listening to the answers have been instrumental in changing the way healthcare is delivered in Wales. But hers is a soul that is driven by a clear purpose – to improve health equity and outcomes whilst keeping healthcare spending under control. “As a GP, I could see that resources were not going to where they needed to go to improve patients’ lives,” Sally says as she describes how she unwittingly became part of a growing group of people advocating for the concept that is now commonly referred to as value-based healthcare. “I was thinking about the allocation of resources and how to improve outcomes long before I had heard the term value-based healthcare.