Dylan’s Story – Clinical Leadership Course

I’ve spent most of last week working on a leadership course here at CHUK, with Lisa Kelly, the COO of a large UK hospital (University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust). “INSPIRE through Clinical Leadership” is a work in progress. Lisa was in Lusaka with the University of Zambia anesthesia residency program for a year 2012-13. During that time she included leadership and management skills as part of the curriculum. Unfortunately when she left, there was no obvious replacement to teach these skills to out residents, so we’ve been working on putting the material in a course that could be delivered over 3-4 days. The idea is that the course would be run one week, and that participants with leadership experience would be selected for a train the trainers day. The following week the new local faculty could ruin the course themselves. We’ve run two pilots of the course in Lusaka, last year and in February this year, generously funded by the Tropical Health and Education Trust. This week was our first pilot in a different context – Rwanda – to see how generalizable the material is, and refine further. This time the course was supported by CASIEF.

I think that the course went really well. It’s very interactive and based on reflection, sekf-awareness and understanding key concepts. We covered an introduction to leadership and leadership styles, the patient experience, personal influence and managing a team, project management and performance management. Some parts were quite different due to cultural issues – in particular the scenario we had to work through conflict resolution didn’t really work in the very conflict averse Rwandan context. Back to the drawing board with that one. Language also slowed things down. English is the language of instruction here at the University of Rwanda, but in reality it’s usually people’s 2nd or 3rd language after Kinyarwanda and French. We just had to reduce the amount of content, trying to get the key points across. I think we may have to translate some material – e.g. self assessments – for next time.

We got great feedback from the participants. I feel that leadership skills are so important here in Rwanda, where it’s so important to lead change in healthcare to improve patient outcomes. Lisa will be back early next year for a second pilot – and I hope the course material will be ready for dissemination soon after that.