Strengthening health system leadership in practice.

The field of health leadership is shifting rapidly, and there is an opportunity to learn with health leaders about what is needed to support health leadership education, research, and practice. In 2022, to augment student feedback and faculty praxis, Royal Roads University (RRU) conducted 12 virtual interviews with senior health system leaders across various settings to learn how health leaders can better respond to emerging and future leadership needs and priorities facing health systems. Findings from this study informed the development of a health-specific elective for the MAL-H program entitled Considerations for Health Systems Renewal. This elective explores the following topics that emerged from this research study: (1) an orientation to possibility; (2) emerging strategic HR concerns; (3) healthcare innovation; (4) relational and social systems leadership; (5) polarity thinking; (6) trauma-informed leadership; and (7) Canadian healthcare networks. In this article, we share our research process and findings to arrive at these recommendations.

Partnership in care: Organic systems framework strategies for patients and care providers.

The organic systems framework is a conceptual social sciences theoretical framework developed by renowned author Barry Oshry. Oshry outlines how we are often blind to the context we are in and our reactions to those conditions, which leads to certain experiences. This article emanates from the author's reflections on bringing organic systems insights to groups and organizations worldwide and how such strategies in relational systems may apply to patients and care providers working together in partnership. As patients and care providers engage in such partnerships, they enter distinctly different contexts, each with unique challenges and opportunities. Written from a first-person perspective, the author moves beyond seeing the patient as a client in the healthcare system and into the possibilities of how patients and providers can work together across contexts to create and sustain meaningful care-based partnerships.

Applied systems thinking: The impact of system optimization strategies on financial and quality performance in a team-based simulation.

At its core, this research was undertaken to explore the extent to which system optimization leadership strategies such as innovation, collaboration, and data-driven decision-making affect financial and quality performance in organizations. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest research design was used to examine the increase or decrease in system performance as a result of treatment in the form of a systems thinking workshop and strategy discussion. The application of three-core system strategies lead to significant gains in financial performance across all teams, and an increase in quality performance in all but one team. In addition to an increase in performance, this research also revealed the tendency of social systems to reflexively sub-optimize their performance and at times lose focus on higher order system goals. Helpful recommendations for leadership practice and future research are presented with a view to helping optimize whole systems and not solely their parts.

A system of system lenses for leadership decision-making.

The sheer volume and dynamics among system agents in healthcare makes decision-making a daunting task at all levels. Being clear about what leaders mean by "healthcare system" is critical in aligning system strategy and leadership decision-making. This article presents an emerging set of lenses (ideology and beliefs, rational and irrational information processing, interpersonal social dynamics, process and value creation, and context) to help frame leadership decision-making in healthcare systems.