When should this occur?

Ideally before an AMBIT training is booked

Who should give the briefing?

Senior members of the team requesting the training - or AMBIT trainers

The Necessity for Senior Managerial Support

• There is ample evidence from Implementation Science that achieving organisational change of any form is challenging
• The adoption of evidence-based or evidence-oriented practices such as AMBIT is no different.
• This is backed up by the experience of the AMBIT project at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, which has now trained over 150 separate teams in AMBIT.
• Those teams which have lacked significant senior management support to empower them to create new ways of working have struggled to implement much objectively new staff behaviour, regardless of how positively (individually or collectively) they have rated their impression of the AMBIT training.

Examples of low senior managerial support:

• Lack of engagement by senior managers in understanding the core features of AMBIT.
• Consider senior managers attending for part or all of the training
• See AMBIT: an overview
• Consider the ways in which AMBIT may or may not "fit" with existing service priorities and structures.
• Purchase of AMBIT training as a means of "avoiding underspend on the training budget" rather than for its perceived intrinsic value.
• Consider alternative ways to spend money
• AMBIT is not a one-size-fits-all approach but...
• It is also about empowering teams to develop clearer, more explicit ways of working, that are sensitive to the existing service eco-system, but which may also invite greater flexibility in working roles (following the service user's needs, rather than primarily the institution's.)

Clarity about the intentions for the training

• Senior managers should be part of the discussion that helps to define a set of Post-training outcome goals
• They should sign these off, as being in keeping with the goals of the wider organisation.