The ‘deployment’ of medical leadership

[摘要] If there’s a latent theme hiding in this month’s Life & Times, it has something to do with qualities of good leadership.The theme for the print and online issue is ‘disadvantaged and vulnerable people’. David Misselbrook, in a previous introduction to Life & Times, coined the term ‘The inverse power law’, a notion that the more disempowered someone is by circumstance, the less likely it is that they will shape policy aimed at them (or indeed any aspect of their care).So how can leadership, autonomy, or even ‘power’ (if you will) be better deployed and distributed?LEADERS SHOULD NOT BE SHACKLED TO A PROCESS Saul Miller laments change without progress. Effective leadership requires engagement with difficult and complex details, and not just vision without careful implementation.Leadership encompasses appropriate reflective learning. Adam Smith famously demonstrated how a factory line approach could be applied to the production of pins to generate epic gains in efficiency, and healthcare leaders might be tempted to apply industry business models to health care. Imagine the patient as a car on the assembly line and the clinicians as robots!In this issue we have a powerful argument by Lara Shemtob and colleagues that general practice cannot be piecework, because patients are not cars (or even pins). This approach is not only distressing for the service user, but also for service providers as well. People are not things.Ahmed Rashid notes the lack of openness around industrial technology in relation to machine learning, as well as the benefits of parallel professions learning alongside one another and of medical students having a long attachment to general practice. Communication and community trump industrialisation as a goal of effective leadership in health care.

[学科分类] 卫生学