A common complaint in the healthcare industry in recent years is that it has too many managers, and that these managers not only take money away from frontline care but also lack the medical expertise and experience to truly understand things. For instance, a recent report in the Daily Telegraph revealed that half of all medical staff have no medical qualifications.
A remedy for this, you might imagine, is for medics to graduate into managerial roles, and therefore bring their clinical expertise to the management teams. Research from Harvard Business School reminds us, however, that precious few doctors receive any kind of leadership or management training, so may be unsuited to the task.
Managerial expertise
While the pandemic obviously shone a light on the incredible medical expertise of healthcare workers, it also highlighted the tremendous importance of skills such as supply chain management, strategic planning, and interpersonal communication. The authors explain that despite these skills often being crucial to the performance and wellbeing of doctors, they aren’t skills that are included in medical training.
The authors accept that burnout in the medical profession has reached incredible heights during the pandemic, they nonetheless believe there is a strong desire for management skills.
“There’s a thirst for this type of information among clinicians,” they explain. “There are a lot of clinicians who are looking for ways to put management tools—such as finance, strategy, operations, and leadership—together to take on larger leadership roles.”
New skills
In many ways, the pandemic underlined the need for more skills, especially as many operational factors were moved to virtual platforms due to social distancing regulations. Add in the need to procure scarce equipment and restructure existing caseloads to manage the influx of Covid patients, and it was an extremely challenging time, both from a visionary leadership perspective and an operational perspective to deliver on this vision.
For instance, the early months of the pandemic saw rapid digital transformation in medicine, with technologies such as telehealth introduced in double quick time. These technologies were hugely valuable, but did require a change in mindset from physicians.
“Medicine has traditionally relied on a physician seeing a patient in person at a moment in time, but the pandemic has highlighted that there are many things that don’t necessarily need to be done in person,” the researchers explain.
The introduction of these technologies has opened up various opportunities to deliver care in a new way, so strategic capabilities can be crucial in helping to both envision and realize these ideas.
“First you have to convince the provider that a new technology makes sense in terms of delivering effective patient care. Then you need to make sure that the incentives physicians face do not run counter to their using the most effective approach for a given patient. Making all of this happen may require physicians to initiate and manage significant change within their organizations or lobby for changes to external regulation and public policy,” the authors continue.
Making it happen
Of course, making this happen is far from straightforward. Medical training is already extremely long and the burnout experienced by medical professionals signifies the extreme lack of time most clinicians have to do anything new.
The researchers believe, however, that many managerial skills can be learned alongside clinical skills, as leadership, like medicine, is often best learned through observation and practice. Indeed, the case study method used in many business schools is similar to the approach used in many medical schools, so they are confident that management and leadership training could be integrated.
“As you are working on clinical skills that involve interacting with patients,” they conclude, “you can also be building management skills that involve interacting with colleagues.”
