Healthcare Management Forum

The Emerging Health Leaders (EHL) network was established in 2006 to enhance the leadership capacity of early careerists in the health sector in Canada. Ten years later, the development of the next generation of health leaders continues to be a focus for system leaders. Despite the rhetoric, financial investments in leadership development remain stagnant. This article describes the network’s experience in supporting the professional development needs of aspiring leaders across Canada. Successes and challenges regarding the development of the network are discussed, as are the results from a recent benchmarking survey, which identify remaining gaps and priorities for aspiring young leaders. Recommendations are also provided—based on the EHL experience—about how senior leaders can look to support and leverage the contributions of young leaders.

Social media has transformed how people communicate both in non-healthcare and healthcare-specific settings. Due to social media’s growing importance in society, it is likely that this form of communication will reshape various elements of how healthcare is conceptualized, managed, and delivered. To explore this emerging issue, this article describes the current use of social media in healthcare and examines the future digital transformation of healthcare. Finally, recommendations toward leveraging social media, and how emerging leaders can act as digital stewards to inform future healthcare environments, are also provided.

Over the past decade, the Patients as Partners Movement has spread throughout healthcare systems across Canada. This movement aims to overcome the paternalistic approach, where the system and its providers act for or deliver services to the patient. Instead, decision-making at all levels is to be shared with the patient. Delivering patient- and family-centred care is the goal of the Patients as Partners Movement and authentic engagement is at its core. This article aims to explore the link between the Patients as Partners Movement and authentic engagement. It will then outline how senior leaders can capitalize on the mindset of emerging leaders and support their development through mentorship and encouraging skill-building in key competencies related to authentic engagement. Support in these areas by senior leaders is suggested to enable the retention and development of a powerful generation of health system leaders who view patients as their partners.

In initiating its first central office for Quality Improvement (QI), The Scarborough Hospital (TSH) sought to accelerate momentum towards achieving its “Quality and Sustainability” strategic priority by building internal capacity in the emerging QI specialty of operations research. The Scarborough Hospital reviewed existing models of talent management in conjunction with Lean and improvement philosophies. Through simple guiding principles and in collaboration with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Healthcare Engineering, TSH developed a targeted approach to talent management for Operations Research (OR) in the Office of Innovation and Performance Improvement, reduced the time from staffing need to onboarding, accelerated the development of new staff in delivering QI and OR projects, and defined new structures and processes to retain and develop this group of new emerging health leaders.

This article describes key considerations for creation of evidence-informed in-house physician leadership development. Ten elements extracted from a scan of the peer-reviewed and grey literature are presented, and key learnings at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre, a quaternary academic health sciences centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, are highlighted. Each element is briefly described with practical considerations and challenges to implementation outlined in the context of the former Capital District Health Authority, where the authors collaborated to create in-house physician leadership development prior to the consolidation of health districts in that province. The purpose of this article is to share how the authors used evidence to plan physician leadership development and to explore the additional situational and contextual factors and considerations needed for implementation.

Mentorship plays an important role in supporting the career development of health leaders. An examination of mentorship programs in different organizational settings provides a frame of reference to discuss and explore personal and professional mentorship experiences. Specifically, between October 2015 and April 2016, the Emerging Health Leaders (EHL) National Health Leadership Conference (NHLC) working group collaborated on an environmental scan of mentorship programs and activities to understand innovations in mentorship. In April 2016, EHL Toronto developed a mentor feedback survey using the LEADS in a Caring Environment framework to capture the varied experiences of mentors engaged in EHL Toronto’s past mentorship events. A summary of this data presented at the 2016 NHLC situates a discussion on the highly interconnected and iterative nature of mentorship and leadership development in career progression. Mentorship is seen as a continuous journey of discovery, shared learning, and personal and professional development to achieve leadership excellence.

Genome editing technologies promise therapeutic advances for genetic diseases. We discuss the ethical and societal issues raised by these technologies, including their use in preclinical research, their potential to address mutations in somatic cells, and their potential to make germ line alterations that may be passed to subsequent generations. We call for a proportionate response from health leaders based on a realistic assessment of benefits, risks, and timelines for clinical translation.

Les technologies de modification du génome promettent des avancées dans le traitement des maladies génétiques. Les auteurs abordent les enjeux éthiques et sociaux que soulèvent ces technologies, y compris leur utilisation dans des recherches précliniques, leur potentiel à résoudre les mutations somatiques et leur potentiel à modifier les lignées germinales qui peuvent être transmises aux prochaines générations. Ils demandent une réponse modérée de la part des leaders en santé, reposant sur une évaluation réaliste des avantages, des risques et des délais d’application clinique.