NEJM: Leading Clinicians and Clinicians Leading

Last month, the New England Journal of Medicine published a perspective article on leadership titled, "Leading Clinicians and Clinicians Leading."

Richard M.J. Bohmer, M.B., Ch.B., M.P.H. writes "Better organizational performance improves health outcomes, and clinical leadership affects performance. Calls for leadership are common, but the specifics of which clinicians need to do what remain unclear."

He then goes into saying " Leaders create conditions that enable and encourage others to achieve a shared goal through collective action — a challenge in health care, since most clinicians were schooled as individualists, don't necessarily view the goal as shared, and generally feel more accountable to professional bodies than local hierarchies."

He describes 4 key tasks that front-line clinicians leading local systems must achieve in order to be effective leaders. Read the full article here.

Richard Bohmer, MBChB, MPH, is a New Zealand trained physician on the faculty of Harvard Business School. He graduated from the Auckland University School of Medicine and has practiced hospital and primary medicine in New Zealand and England. In 1989 he was part of a clinical team that established and ran a surgical hospital in Sudan. He attended the Harvard School of Public Health on a Fulbright Scholarship, graduating in 1993 with a Masters of Public Health in Health Care Management, and joined the HBS faculty in 1997.