Question

1. List four topics for healthcare team leader training with details

2. Provide two examples of interprofessional healthcare team training programs used in the United States.

Answer 1

Ans) Four topics for healthcare team leader training:

1) Employee Leadership
The skill most important for leadership success is critical in every company, regardless of industry: the ability to effectively lead people and teams.

A highly variable skill, great leadership requires self-awareness and a particular savvy with interpersonal communication and relationship building. A great leader of people knows how to

Build teams of talented employees
Act with fairness when dealing with direct reports
Delegate decision making to develop employee skills and confidence
Coach employees and foster their professional development and career opportunities.
Drawing on these crucial leadership skills, a great leader creates a strong workplace culture—which in turn drives positive trends in employee engagement and retention.

Leaders who value participative management also encourage employees to share ideas, information, reactions, and perspectives.
In an industry with cavernous talent gaps, engaging and retaining strong performers is paramount to success—as defined by patient satisfaction and health outcomes.

2. Resourcefulness
Even in organizations with seemingly vast budgets, resources always seem to be in shorter-than-ideal supply. We always wish for more time, more and more skilled job candidates, fewer regulatory constraints, and—of course—more budget for our department or program.

Good leaders are creative. They solve problems for themselves and for their teams. They get input, allocate resources for maximum impact, and find innovative ways to inspire and empower their teams to deliver superior patient care.

The leaders you want to hire and develop will possess the hallmarks of resourcefulness.

3. Composure
Healthcare is a fast-paced, high-risk industry. Every decision healthcare practitioners make at work affects a patient’s wellbeing and potentially, their life.

A good leader is one that can navigate within a stressful environment without creating additional stress by reacting impulsively.

With employee burnout at new levels in healthcare, strong leaders must know both how to manage their own emotions and work-life balance AND how to support and empower employees to take care of themselves.

4. Change Management
In addition to being fast-based and demanding on a daily basis, healthcare is also a constantly and rapidly evolving industry.

Healthcare leaders must be sufficiently nimble to quickly grasp and devise strategies to manage change from seemingly all sides, including, for example

• Technological advancements in diagnostics and treatment
• New and expanding regulatory requirements
• Mergers and integrations of healthcare delivery networks
• Seismic shifts in the health insurance market
• Opioid addiction and other complex health epidemics.
Healthcare organizations rely on their leaders to understand and adapt to changes themselves. They must guide the workforce, navigating the human side of change management. They must understand the importance of using data to drive and inform organizational changes. And they must be savvy enough to use change management as an opportunity to strengthen communities of practice.

2) Interprofessional healthcare team training programs:

1) Administrative support. Coordination of interprofessional experiences may require significant changes in the curriculum structure of one or more colleges. Deans, curriculum committees, and educational administrators must be supportive of these activities.

2) Interprofessional programmatic infrastructure. Faculty resources are essential. Faculty members from each college are needed to provide leadership and recruit teaching faculty from their college, as well as coordinating activities between colleges. Additionally, administrative support is needed to schedule rooms, confirm mentor availability, submit attendances and grades, and find substitutes when necessary.

3) Committed, experienced faculty. It takes dedicated and educated faculty and staff to provide leadership to student groups, whether in a didactic or a clinical setting.

4) Acknowledge student efforts through awards, certificates, or grades.

While there are many barriers to developing successful interprofessional learning experiences, they can be overcome with persistence and commitment, as demonstrated in these examples of successful programs. Given the importance of quality care outcomes and the recognition that collaborative practice improves these outcomes, interprofessional education should be a high priority for every training instution.