Purpose Health care systems increasingly demand health professionals who can lead interdisciplinary teams. While physicians recognize the importance of leadership skills, few receive formal instruction in this area. This paper aims to describe how the Student Leadership Committee (SLC) at the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care responded to this need by creating a leadership curriculum for health professions students. Design/methodology/approach The SLC designed an applied longitudinal leadership curriculum and taught it to medical, dentistry, nursing, public health and business students during monthly meetings over two academic years. The perceptions of the curriculum were assessed via a retrospective survey and an assessment of team functioning. Findings Most teams met their project goals and students felt that their teams were effective. The participants reported increased confidence that they could create change in healthcare and an enhanced desire to hold leadership positions. The sessions that focused on operational skills were especially valued by the students. Practical implications This case study presents an effective approach to delivering leadership training to health professions students, which can be replicated by other institutions. Social implications Applied leadership training empowers health professions students to improve the health-care system and prepares them to be more effective leaders of the future health-care teams. The potential benefits of improved health-care leadership are numerous, including better patient care and improved job satisfaction among health-care workers. Originality/value Leadership skills are often taught as abstract didactics. In contrast, the approach described here is applied to ongoing projects in an interdisciplinary setting, thereby preparing students for real-world leadership positions.
Effective implementation of robust team-based care in the United States requires significant training for all team members. This education is integral to creating a culture of collaboration and respect among interprofessional members of the health care team. The lack of interprofessional clinical educational experiences contributes to a "hidden curriculum" that reinforces the problematic view that medicine is at the top of a hierarchy among health professions. However, learners themselves have started resisting this view by integrating crossdisciplinary team-based training into their own education. One example of learner-based leadership in interprofessional team care is the Crimson Care Collaborative at Cambridge Health Alliance, a student-faculty collaborative family medicine clinic. This successful clinic demonstrates that high-quality interprofessional clinical education can be accomplished through partnerships between educational institutions and existing patient-centered medical homes. IntroductionThe US medical system is undergoing a paradigm shift from traditional "one doctor, one patient" interactions, largely limited to addressing acute issues, to a chronic care model within patient-centered medical homes in order to more effectively address a spectrum of needs for each patient at each visit [1,2]. Compared to intermittent, one-on-one interactions, interdisciplinary teams have demonstrated improved outcomes in patients with chronic disease [3][4][5][6][7][8] and effective population-based prevention strategies [9][10][11][12]. Yet there is still room for improvement.
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