Healthcare educational leadership in the twenty-first century

Abstract

Education leadership has to intimately lead our future champions of students and nurture them as professional, dynamic, reflective scholars to deal with the complex world of healthcare in a post-truth era. In addition the organization structure needs to develop faculty from clinical and educational supervisors through to program directors and Deans. Leadership theories have taken over from the previous decades of teaching on management. The current dogma is intransigent, and produces silos such as leadership and followership or leaders and managers as class differences which reinforces the obdurate and narrow-minded approach. This contradicts the open society of creating change agents, critical thinkers, and scholars of the conceptual age of post modernity who in a knowledge based economy need to take our world forward. Additionally healthcare is rapidly becoming unaffordable as returns on GDP investment do not give the returns that we as patients and tax payers need. There is the obvious waste of people and funding on constant reorganizations and short-term thinking. This reflects the sort of leaders and organizations we are developing and how decisions are made. This paper through ideas confronts the myths and flaws of current leadership teaching in an education framework. It makes the case for innovative, creative, adroit, adept, experiential learners who can see the bigger picture, avoid harm and be able to cope with complexity and uncertainty, thereby creating a paradigm shift so that future leaders can problem solve, through the ongoing seismic changes that healthcare faces.

From a View of the Hospital as a System to a View of the Suffering Patient

“…Hospitals are complex multi-agency systems that need to act as single entities in synergy with many subsystems and elements that are dependent on one another and use multiple operating variables (1). The successful management of such complex systems requires skilled managerial thinking that places at its center both the hospital as a system and the patients (2).…”

Sustained effects of faculty leadership development modules for clinical instructors of core competences education in Taiwan: a four-year explanatory case study

“…The limitations of this study include the following. First, it did not assess outcomes at level 4 of the Kirkpatrick Model such as whether the intervention FD module improved clinical education or decreased medical errors [14,15,[36][37][38][39]. Therefore, it will be necessary to assess such parameters in the future.…”

“…However, a survey of participants revealed that our previous regular FD module did not effectively cultivate their ability to play multiple roles (instructors and leaders) or to take on corresponding responsibilities (delivering, designing and leading CC education) [14,15]. The aims of implementing leadership in FD is to train leaders who can solve challenges in medical practice and education [14,15].…”

“…Moreover, since 2013, clinical instructors in this country have been facing new challenges, including the extension of postgraduation training from 3 months to 2 years, an amendment in the number of years of medical school study from seven to six, and limitation on work hours for all residents [10][11][12]. Accordingly, clinical instructors are expected to competently show the way in delivering, designing and leading CC education that fits the need of a system in the midst of reform [13][14][15].…”

Advancing quality culture in health professions education: experiences and perspectives of educational leaders

“…In a study by Bordage et al ( 2000 ), being visionary, open-minded, and trustworthy stood out as preferred personality attributes of HPE leaders. Contemporary research implies that the strategic, employee-oriented and value driven processes associated with the influence of leaders do not merely depend on powerful, charismatic, or visionary leadership (Sandhu 2019 ). Rather, a shift is taking place from leader-centred theories to understanding leadership impact based on shared, collaborative, and distributed approaches (McKimm and Lieff 2013 ).…”