Strengthening Leadership Capacity: An Unaddressed Issue in Healthcare Systems
85% of healthcare professionals surveyed had never attended any management training, with lack of motivation, communication, and leadership skills ranking among the top five self-identified challenges.
Context
To highlight the leadership skills gap among health professionals in a transforming public healthcare system, and to raise concerns about how ambitious health reforms can be achieved without formal, prospective leadership training for the clinical workforce.
Outcomes included:
- Self-reported leadership challenges across five competency domains
- Prevalence of prior management training
- Distribution of challenges by ACHE competency domain
- Workforce sector (public vs private)
- Years of clinical experience
Methods
- Nine management development programmes conducted between 2012 and 2020.
- Questionnaire data collected from 416 healthcare professionals (N=444; 94% response rate).
- Participants asked to identify leadership challenges perceived as critical.
- 47 unique challenges identified and mapped across five domains of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) Competency Assessment Tool (2020).
- Secondary sources reviewed including peer-reviewed literature, grey literature, and government websites.
Outcome measures:
Frequency of self-reported leadership challenges by ACHE domain; prevalence of prior management training; sector of employment; mean years of experience.
Results
- 85.36% of participants had never attended any management or leadership training programme.
- 56.1% were from the public sector; mean total clinical experience was 18 years.
- Top 5 challenges: lack of motivation (54.26%), communication (52.38%), contracts management (48.31%), leadership skills (47.26%), and retention of workforce (45.56%).
- The greatest concentration of challenges (29 of 47) fell within the domain of business skills and knowledge.
- Knowledge of the healthcare environment accounted for 9 challenges; leadership, professionalism, and communication and relationship management each accounted for 3.
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