Professional growth can spur system transformation
By Ashley Scott, Program Director of the MHLP in Clinical Education.
The challenges facing health care today are well known, but in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have become more acute than ever. Clinician burnout, workforce shortages, an aging population requiring more complex care, and increasingly constrained resources are placing immense pressure on the health-care system.
For frontline workers, the daily reality can be incredibly frustrating. We enter the health-care field to provide the best care possible to our patients, yet systemic barriers can make this feel impossible. For health-care leaders the challenge is just as great, ensuring the well-being of team members while ensuring high-quality, efficient health-care.
How do we move from recognizing these challenges to creating real, meaningful change? What practical strategies can leaders use to improve the well-being and safety of their teams while providing high-quality care?
UBC’s Master of Health Leadership and Policy (MHLP) in Clinical Education is designed to answer these questions, equipping students with the skills and confidence to drive meaningful change as person-centred leaders. There is such a strong connection between clinical education and leadership. If you are a curriculum developer or clinical educator, you are a leader with significant influence to work for change. The skills you learn in becoming an adept clinical educator translate directly into being a strong leader, giving you the skills to build the capacity and strength of every single person on your team.
The interdisciplinary nature of the program – and the students in it – is another way the MHLP provides a path to leadership and guiding system transformation. Our student cohort includes professionals from a range of health-care backgrounds, such as nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, dentistry, medicine and paramedicine, among others. This creates a collaborative learning environment that challenges disciplinary siloes, fosters systems thinking, promotes holistic approaches and encourages innovation.
Innovation is at the heart of the MHLP. As a professional master’s program, students tackle real-world organizational challenges throughout their coursework, applying their learning to areas they are passionate about or actively working in. The ideas they come up with are powerful and innovative, whether it’s an interesting approach to curriculum design or developing a strategy for change management. Our program also helps students learn how to implement these ideas, whether or not they are currently in a leadership position. This comes from a lot of practice in pitching ideas in a compelling way, in working in groups, in guiding conversations and in giving presentations backed up with data and evidence.
It also comes from the hybrid nature of the program. Business courses taught through UBC Sauder provide students with essential skills in leadership, project management, sustainability and business foundations, alongside their peers in the Master of Engineering Leadership program.
My research focuses on digital transformation and innovation, and many of our classroom discussions explore the role of technology in health-care practice. We examine how technology is reshaping health-care practice and how clinical educators and leaders can ensure practitioners are involved in the development and implementation of new technologies.
Health-care practitioners must transition from being passive recipients of technology – what I once heard the Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at the NHS aptly call “being digitally done to” – to leading the next generation of technological innovation. Drawing from my own experiences in the UK, Australia and Canada, I’ve seen firsthand how empowering clinicians in this process leads to better patient care and more effective systems.
The MHLP in Clinical Education at UBC is a catalyst for change, not just a program. By equipping health professionals with leadership, education and business acumen, we are preparing the next generation of change-makers who will drive improvements in patient care, workforce well-being and system-wide transformation.
