Diminishing the healthcare quality cost quotient in the new millennium is the desired outcome for every integrated healthcare system.
Guaranteeing value delivery in healthcare is conceivably the most challenging element of healthcare service delivery, especially in developing healthcare settings such as Ghana.
Managerial and leadership competencies are critical in ensuring quality and accessible healthcare that reduces cost and cost acceleration. Effective leadership is needed to shape organizational culture to drive the reforms necessitated to advance care in a complex and dynamic healthcare setting.
Effective Leaders engage and empower others to act on a vision to accomplish an organizational goal. Managers, however, execute the actions needed to achieve these goals through efficient use of resources. In the healthcare setting, the concept of management is often closely related and interchangeable with leadership. The dichotomy between leaders and managers has narrowed. Leadership and management are not automatic. Healthcare leaders must possess
- Extensive knowledge of the healthcare industry
- Technical knowledge/skills
- Analytic/conceptual skills
- Interpersonal and communications skills
These core competencies ensure that leaders blend people-oriented and task-oriented styles. Needless to say, one’s technical skills alone by their training do not guarantee effective leadership.
Why leadership/management is vital in the healthcare system
Each of the three (3) levels of management in healthcare is essential in ensuring quality patient care. Frontline managers, middle managers, and top managers in healthcare systems that aspire to be change agents must establish a sense of urgency and form a powerful guiding coalition to transform our healthcare system.
Leaders/managers drive innovation – Contemporary healthcare is experiencing a constant transformation to sustain quality improvement due to change forces such as emerging technologies and changing patient demographics. Healthcare leaders must think differently to recognize the barriers to innovation and help deliver value to our clients (Patients).
Leaders build effective teams – Patient-centered care is a team effort and is highly dependent on leaders creating a vision and communicating the vision to the entire team. Establishing a positive work culture ensures that each member of the healthcare system will share the same organizational vision. Leaders that derive their power from intimidating other healthcare professional will only impede the delivery of comprehensive health care.
Which profession makes a better leader/manager in the healthcare setting
There is no de-facto leader in the healthcare setting. Leadership must be based on competencies. Leadership/management choices take into account the overall goal of healthcare delivery, i.e., ensuring patient safety and delivering quality care. That said, certain leadership positions may require technical/professional skills to be weighted more than the other competencies. The organizational level influences the preferred competency. Generalist trained managers, professional health service managers, and clinician managers all have crucial roles to play in quality healthcare delivery.
Top managers or C-suite managers lead an entire organization and determine the strategic direction of the healthcare system. For example, the president of Johns Hopkins Medical Institute is a registered nurse-clinician leader. (https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/about/leadership/biography/kevin-sowers). The president of Yale Newhaven health has a master’s in hospital administration (generalist trained).
Middle and frontline managers may have to demonstrate a certain level of technical competency and experience before they can lead/manage teams. Frontline managers provide direct supervision to care providers, while middle managers are responsible for entire units within the healthcare organization.
Clinical laboratory services are a valuable, indispensable component of quality health and are often the cash cows of most healthcare organizations. Leadership in the laboratory must be based on competency irrespective of whether the person has clinical training or otherwise. Certification by the mandated council and adequately demonstrating leadership/management competencies should be the model for assuming management positions.
Specialists in laboratory medicine, by definition, work in the laboratory space. Allied health professionals and medical doctors specialized in laboratory medicine should be on the same team. It is worth noting that specific highly specialized laboratory fields often have someone with a clinical background. Laboratory directors or technical supervisors are usually certified medical doctors, Ph.D. scientists, or medical laboratory scientists (https://labtestsonline.org/articles/medical-laboratory-professionals).
Recommendations
Integrated healthcare delivery demands collaboration and team effort among all professionals in the healthcare system. The current power struggle in our healthcare system will only undermine quality healthcare delivery. The best healthcare system deliberately inculcates leadership skills among healthcare professionals to guarantee that healthcare delivery transitions from volume-based care to value-based care. These recommendations are by no means the panoply of the efforts required to provide effective leadership.
Leadership-development models in our academic programs– Leadership is crucial in delivering quality healthcare. The training of healthcare professionals should incorporate leadership development models in our educational programs. The distributive theory of leadership makes this even more compelling. The current training lacks a fundamental component of developing core competencies required to become effective health care managers. Our educational system must be interdisciplinary to allow healthcare professionals to enroll in managerial courses in business school. The flexibility of students taking classes across departments is a common practice in most established tertiary institutions. During my MBA program, students from other departments (medicine, public health, nursing) were allowed to take elective courses in the business school.
Succession planning– The healthcare system is complex and swiftly evolving. Current leaders need to identify individuals who demonstrate leadership competencies and prepare them for higher positions. Quality healthcare requires leaders to acknowledge that planning their succession is a crucial component of being transformational leaders.
Continuous competency-based development – Leadership is a perpetual learning process, especially in a rapidly changing environment. Opportunities must be made available for all healthcare professionals to engage in ongoing professional and competency-based development, especially healthcare leadership and management.
Informal training approaches such as coaching, mentoring – Mentorship is critical in ensuring that future leaders are strategically positioned to assume leadership positions. Our educational system in the healthcare sector is highly deficient in mentorship programs. Our leaders prefer to be called bosses. However, bosses blame, and leaders fix. In our system, most bosses intimidate and command their subordinates while leaders rely on their teams. The boss posture of healthcare leaders is a contributory reason why there is so much friction between the different healthcare professionals in our hospitals.
Conclusion
Competent leadership and management are critical components of ensuring cost-effective healthcare delivery without compromising quality and patient safety. Efforts should be made to train all healthcare professionals to prepare them for leadership positions. Doctors, Nurses, and allied health professionals are all imperative for building a robust health care system. Leadership/Management opportunities should be given to those who demonstrate the competency required to ensure efficient care delivery.
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Written by: Sqn Ldr Banda Khalifa MD, MPH, MBA Beta Gamma Sigma | (Member of International Business Honor Society) | Implementation science researcher | Healthcare leadership/Management and Systems Improvement | Sommer Scholar ‘20 Johns Hopkins University
Email: [email protected]
The post There is no de-facto manager in contemporary leadership for quality healthcare delivery [Article] appeared first on Citinewsroom - Comprehensive News in Ghana.
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