Some days are spent at a patient’s bedside in Lahore. Some days are spent attending a global health assembly, where resolutions are debated for populations of millions. I have learned not to trust how easily I move between the two. The ward is where the day is most specific. As a final-year medical student, my […]
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From aspiration to access: why the NHS needs capability pathways for its next generation of leaders. By Marina Khan
I have a career ambition I have rarely said out loud: I aspire to lead at the highest levels of the NHS. Not because I am attached to a particular title, but because I want to contribute to healthcare at scale, shaping strategy, influencing systems and helping to build a health service that works better […]
How Intimate Can Geopolitics Get with Our Health? By Gafidyn Wesonga
“Money doesn’t simply disappear from the global health system. Political priorities change.” Gafidyn Rae Wesonga examines how shifts in global health financing and donor priorities can shape health systems, services and access to care. Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity (AFHE) brings together health professionals from around the world and across disciplines to build leaders, create […]
Unlocking the Leader Within – A Book Review by Sabrina Hersi and Alice Deasy
This concise textbook seeks to introduce medical students to leadership concepts and support the development of leadership and teamwork skills. Its international authorship seeks to make the book relevant to a global audience. Divided into three sections – Self Mastery, Teamwork and Residency Applications, the book introduces key leadership concepts before taking a more targeted […]
Pay Attention. By Vanessa Audris Lim
Penicillin. Viagra. Aspartame. X-Rays. No, this is not the world’s strangest shopping list. One began with mould on a petri dish, another with an inconvenient side effect, another with an accidental sweet taste, and another with a mysterious glow from a fluorescent screen. We often tell these stories as accidents, side effects or lucky breaks. […]
Clinicians already reason like designers – they were never given the instruments. By Daniel Steenstra
There is a sentence most clinical leaders have heard in some form: “You have excellent clinical skills, but you’ll need to develop your management thinking.” It is delivered kindly, usually with a course recommendation attached. It is also, on the evidence, backwards. Consider what a clinician does with an undifferentiated presentation. She gathers symptoms and […]
Equity: The Final Frontier of Quality Improvement. By Thomas Merrill
“Health equity can be more than an aspiration attached to quality. It can become how we decide whether quality has indeed been achieved.” Thomas Merrill asks us to look more closely at who benefits from quality improvement, and who might still be left behind. Atlantic Fellows for Health Equity (AFHE) brings together health professionals from […]
Reclaiming the Human Dimension in Healthcare & Leadership. By Louise Younie and Anna Baverstock
‘Creative Enquiry helps us have safety nets for our own emotions and situations, which directly improves how we care for patients. Everyone I know in foundation training goes through all sorts of difficult experiences that we have next to no time to recover from – both physically and emotionally. [Creative Enquiry] supports us to stay […]
Learning That Changes. By Vanessa Audris Lim
(Also known as The Time Göran Hijacked My Podcast and Made It Better) I was hosting a podcast, and I had a plan. I was hosting three leaders whose work I deeply respected and admired: April Kyle from Southcentral Foundation in Alaska, Sarah Woolnough from The King’s Fund in the United Kingdom, and Göran Henriks […]
Inclusive leadership as a clinical imperative: from personal journey to system change. By Sarah Todd
A moment that changed how I saw leadership Early in my career, I witnessed a senior colleague use racially biased language about a patient, then deliver a lower standard of care. I felt shocked, angry and unsure how to respond. At the time, I didn’t have the language to describe what I had seen. But […]