The monosodium glutamate job is still around. The kind of job that satiates when you are in it …. but half an hour after leaving for the day, you feel empty and wonder, “Why I am still doing that job?” Then the next day you come back for more of the same. Most of these jobs are […]
Category: Leadership
It only takes a pandemic to see how countries can use healthcare to reignite flagging nationalism. COVID 19 spawned a new kind of nationalism: vaccine nationalism, the prioritization of the domestic needs of a country over an outlay to others. Even the policies of countries such as Australia and New Zealand, where nationalism is enforced by […]
Last month I presented two virtual sessions at the Harvard Leadership program for women in the health professions. This is a sold-out event, mainly because of the hard work of Dr. Julie Silver and her team. I have been involved for several years and every year I have found the engagement of the audience increasing. Given the […]
Hospitals are full of people sick with CoVID but not all of them are patients. More and more staff in our hospitals are turning up for work that they are unable to do. They are present, but not working at their best, either due to their own health problems, increased CoVID-related workload, or CoVID anxiety. […]
There are still not enough women in high level leadership positions in healthcare to cement change which improves the health inequalities for women. Two contradictions hold back many women who try. These are encompassed in what I call reticence. The qualities of nurturing and maintaining harmony keep women feeling comfortable in the thinking of middle […]
Whatever the political divides, citizens worldwide agree that responsible government should provide adequate healthcare for the whole population. Unfortunately, both patients and clinicians often get too subsumed in the weight of immediate crises to agitate beyond their own current concerns. Healthy children can help inject our anemic healthcare systems with new blood. We need to […]
Modern healthcare is undemocratic, antisocial and thus largely unresponsive to its patients’ needs. Never before has healthcare been so far removed from the people it services. It is time to bring democracy to health care. Our fragmented systems of silos of clinicians, administrators, funders, policy makers and governments make it almost impossible for voters to […]
Creating a corpus of effective women leaders is the holy grail of health care. Everyone wants it, thinks it is a panacea, and reveres it almost as much as motherhood these days. Despite a plethora of strategies, the critical mass of women leaders required to ignite enduring change is elusive. In part, this is due […]
The UK and the USA have suffered more than their fair share of clinical crises within their health care systems. In the UK, neonates and the elderly are dying in inordinate proportions in hospitals. In the US, deadly infectious diseases are now carried out of the research labs into the wards of the most prestigious hospitals. More doctors […]
Under the surface, health care leadership is a stagnant pond filled with ever deepening chasms between the two rival schools – clinicians and managers. Clinical leadership is no longer about advocating for individual patients, especially about expensive interventions and hospital stays where there is little likelihood of these clinical decisions ever being substantiated by research. […]
Proportionate to the numbers, few women manage break to through the glass ceiling in health care and end up having to both lead and manage from below. In the US, whilst almost half of medical school graduates are women, less one in five of these women have positions as full professors and permanent department chairs. […]
Hospitals are full of sick people and not all of them are patients. More and more staff in our hospitals are turning up for work that they are unable to do. They are present, but not working at their best, either due to health problems or other events that are distracting them or both. It […]
Support medicine based on individuals; not paper. Encourage responsive practice; based on divergent thinking with the ability to converge when necessary. Commit to genuine funding for health, that is, ten percent GDP for ten years from government and private sector. Ensure that hospitals remain places for treating sick people, not making those who treat them […]
Health care has a love affair with teams. Everybody wants to be a good team player. Not me. I’m still struggling with the distinction between groups and teams in health care. And I think I want to be a groupie. A lot of health care requires divergent thinking with the ability to converge when we […]
It’s hard for leaders to breathe life into health care these days because the atmosphere is so polluted by frequent restructuring. Clinical leaders and their teams lose the commitment that made them choose to work in health care in the first place. Teams are worn down by continual change without seeing any positive benefit. Leaders […]
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