Leadership in Health Professions Education

Objectives:

People active in the field of health professions education (at any level of an organisation), have to exhibit management and leadership skills that enable them to change educational practices within their own environment. This might involve a spectrum ranging from relatively minor changes (e.g. the assessment practices in a single educational module) to leading a major revision of an entire undergraduate or postgraduate curriculum. Such changes are inevitably met with various degrees of resistance and often result in conflict. To deal adequately with these situations requires an understanding of personality types and a good knowledge of the principles of leadership and management as well as change and conflict management.
In addition to the leadership and management skills required by us as educators, these are skills that our students also need to acquire, as described in the introduction section above.