Faculty development for leadership and management

Abstract

Although those involved in the education, training, and development of health professionals face similar challenges to other faculty members in higher education, such as increasing student numbers, financial challenges, and increasingly rigorous requirements for quality assurance, the vast majority also carry an additional responsibility of ensuring that the care delivered to patients in their affiliated institutions is high quality and, above all, safe. This foregrounds a whole new set of responsibilities (e.g. clinical, fiscal, ethical) and requires meaningful engagement of faculty members with a wide range of stakeholders. High quality and productive relationships must be developed with senior management teams of service provider organizations, colleagues from professions allied to medicine, patients and community groups, industry, and the wider public. Such a remit requires an extended range of leadership, managerial, and administrative abilities. In this chapter, we discuss what these abilities might be and how best they may be developed, based on the available literature and experience in the field.