Contributed by: Dr. Vandad Yousefi
While health care has made significant strides towards enhancing collaborative inter-professional care, physicians continue to play an important leadership role in how this care is delivered. I believe that leadership is inherent in the practice of medicine. Because of this, physicians can (and should) continue to strengthen their leadership abilities, as much as they continuously develop their clinical knowledge and expertise.
As I continue on my own leadership journey, I have learned that in order to be effective, physician leaders need to adopt three strategies: developing their skills for consensus building, continuous learning of leadership and management skills, and recognizing the importance of creating strong networks of collaborators and peers.
As physicians, we tend to be “doers” and have a tendency to want to implement initiatives and new ideas as soon as possible. In my own leadership journey, I have come to value the importance of deliberate coalition building and the need for developing consensus amongst all stakeholders. Aspiring physician leaders are served well if they remember that the key to success of most initiatives is contingent on having a strong coalition of stakeholders that share a similar vision for the project and are prepared to use their skills (and influence) to take down institutional barriers or propose innovative solutions.
This highlights my second lesson of leadership: the need to develop leadership and management skills through structured programs (such as Master’s degrees or certificate courses). As physicians, we are largely ignorant of the body of knowledge that has developed over the past 50 years in the areas of management and leadership, and just as we strive to continuously keep up to date with our clinical knowledge, we also need to ensure that we become familiar with these non-clinical fields of expertise. Such tools allow us to for example identify stakeholders in an initiative and devise a strategy to engage them.
Finally, the importance of building supportive networks of peers cannot be underestimated. Whether formal or not, such networks can play an important role in allowing physicians to develop their leadership skills and abilities, and provide a venue for sharing of ideas and experiences. We have previously published our experience with creating such a network of physicians involved in quality improvement and patient safety (the Ontario Physician Quality Network - OPPQN). The OPQNet has allowed its members to meet regularly and share experiences.
Vandad Yousefi is a hospitalist who previously worked at Lakeridge Health, and recently joined the Vancouver General Hospital. He is the former Medical Director and Chief of Quality, Safety and Patient Experience at Lakeridge Health, and his interests are quality improvement and hospital medicine.