Healthcare leaders are trained, not born and need to look after their staff as family.
Leadership is a key skill for doctors yet most of us remain untrained or feel unprepared for the role. The best way to train visionary health care leaders to achieve optimal patient outcomes in constrained and congested health system remains up in the air.
Programs tailored to the individual participant’s needs as it relates to their organisational role and career stage disappointingly lead only to short-term enhanced confidence and competence, yet long-term systemwide gains from sustained improved leadership remain unproven.
On the good news front, transformational and “authentic in appropriate doses” leadership are known to improve work engagement and resilience in the workplace, with adaptive, agile and flexible leadership proven to being better to deal with crises such as the covid global pandemic.
Compassionate dynamic leading that fosters collaboration, collectiveness, kindness and caring was critical then and remains more pressing now with Australia’s overstretched public hospitals
There is a saying that “nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care”, and that, for me, always rings true for workplace peers and their heads of unit.
Healthcare needs to be fuelled as a calling with purpose and deep meaning. The active and actionable caring that needs to be dispensed to frontline staff that bear the brunt of daily physical and psychological toil should incite leaders to vouch for staff-centred strategies that optimise and maintain their work engagement and longevity.
Healthcare leaders face challenging times from under-the-pump public hospitals, disruptive technologies, rapidly aging and multi-morbidly complex patients and a burnt-out workforce.
Quality patient care in an overburdened health system needs to continue in step with restoring and maintaining (highly stressed) staff satisfaction and mission. Ongoing professional development — to foster innovation and adaptation, collaboration and communication, self-development and self-awareness — is critical to leadership that underpins good patient care and staff wellbeing.
Using contextual leadership
Being sceptical about a medical administration “upper floor” divorced from coalface emergency medicine patient care on the frontline, I recently completed the associate Fellowship in the Royal Australasian College of Medical Administration, to try to understand the perspective and experience of all staff that drive the healthcare train.
Over six months of Zoom sessions for 40 candidates facilitated by teaching faculty of the RACMA, I came upon the realisation that the clinical unit I work in and my host hospital served as microcellular organelles that play a crucial role in delivering the best patient outcomes by streamlining and integrating their roles to the wider framework and overall function of our complex local health services district – what I consider the equivalent of the “healthcare cell.”
Each “healthcare cell” will then need to be finetuned and synchronised for the totality of the Australia’s public hospital system to purr like a well-oiled sports car engine. This physiological model is analogous to healthily maintained cells and organs requisite to our body running well and happily.
Healthcare leaders remind me of the mechanics that service the healthcare engine when it malfunctions. We learnt how to implement workplace HR and organisational psychology strategies to address problems with underperforming or ill-disciplined staff, both with fair process to the complained about and ensuring patient safety in the interim.
Importantly, our breakout scenario discussions also focused on preventing engine failures. Looking after staff work/life balance, career longevity and engagement underpins the resilience and the sustained satisfaction necessary to waking up every workday with a spring in one’s step.
Related
If doctors, nurses and allied health staff competencies, empathy and going the extra mile in work presenteeism/dedication is to become a truism at this fractured and stressed juncture, then looking after staff needs to be as important, if not more so, than aspirations to look after our sicker, more morbid and aging communities.
This is reminiscent of an orchestra conductor (respected leader) who leads the musicians (passionate healthcare workers) to churn out a memorable symphony (treatment bundle) for our audience (the sick or injured).
The AFRACMA was a revelation to me.
I now strive to become a contextually effective leader that better listens, deploying the most suitable style from a repertoire, to read and respond to the mood of the room.
Learning to orchestrate the tempo and pace of a resuscitation team whose cast members range from loudly declarative to obedient followership types means better outcomes for patients.
The first team’s temperament requires an affiliative approach and the second situation calls for a commandeering role. Both stances enhance team building, by ensuring all (more so the quiet ones) members are canvassed to speak up when the resuscitation outcome is on a knife’s edge.
On the other hand, my research consortia leadership requires a high emotional quotient strategic oversight to negotiate the various challenges posed by powerful university heads, researchers and ethics committees. Brainstorming research ideas requires a visionary style. When protocols are approved, affiliative collaboration is called for. A mentorship and supervision model helps research assistants and post docs see the study through to timely completion.
The AFRACMA has skilled me up in delivering each, or a mixture, of the visionary, democratic, affiliative, coaching, pacesetting and commanding leadership styles required to tune up or fix a fault in the engine of healthcare.
I have no doubt that Daniel Goleman’s aspirations for harmonious leadership to address conflicts, motivate during stressful times, strengthen team bonds, enhance team cohesion and foster a positive workplace culture will be more achievable for those who undertake Leadership for Clinician’s training.
Dr Joseph Ting is a senior staff specialist in emergency medicine at the Mater Hospital Brisbane and Ipswich Hospital.
The author declares no conflict of interest with regards to academic, funding, sponsorship or other sphere of influence or bias. The author does not possess an administrative or any other role with RACMA.