Clinical leadership in hospital care: Leadership and teamwork skills are as important as clinical management skills

doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7509.161-d

BMJ 2005;331:161-162 (16 July), doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7509.161-d

Letter

Clinical leadership in hospital care

Leadership and teamwork skills are as important as clinical management skills

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Olsen and Neale conclude that improving leadershipand teamwork skills among today's doctors is both importantand necessary.¹ However, opportunities in everyday hospitalmedicine to acquire, practise, and receive feedback on theseskills remain scarce.

Unlike other industries—such as aviation, which allowexperienced team members to observe teams in their work environment,thereby enabling structured feedback on leadership and teambehaviours—medicine has not yet placed adequate importanceand resources into training clinical teams in similarly importantnon-technical skills.

The focus of undergraduate teaching and postgraduate advancedlife support courses remains the acquisition of technical skillsand delivery of health care in the context of one doctor, onepatient.

Competent practitioners must learn to interact in and eventuallylead teams of healthcare workers, yet little or no formal teachingis aimed at developing individual doctors' leadership skillsor to helping them to understand the impact of their behaviourand . . . [Full text of this article]

Marino S Festa, consultant in paediatric intensive care

Guy's Hospital, London SE1 9RT Marino.Festa@gstt.nhs.uk