ACCESS Health India has received a mandate from the Telangana state government’s Department of Health and Family Welfare to design and conduct a Leadership Development Program for personnel in leadership roles in each district cluster of the state. The decision comes in the wake of increased emphasis of our work on building leadership and management capacity within the public healthcare sector.
ACCESS Health International has been working with the Telangana state as part of its health systems strengthening work in the areas of eICU, Quality Management Systems, Integrated healthcare, strengthening leadership and governance, and roadmap for IT applications towards National Digital Health Missionstandards.
In realization of the importance of leadership and governance in managing complex health systems, the department of health & family welfare is planning this structured program.The approach to design the course includes an assessment of the current state including performance indicators, governance structure, and key processes as the first step. The next step involves understanding the training needs from the points of view of both the trainers and the trainees. Based on the above, a faculty list will be created and eventually the design and development of the course will take place.
The objective of this program is to impart a deeper understanding of thehealth systems. Specifically, this includes areas such as performance assessment and evaluation against set goals, strategic planning to achieve desired performance, operational/ project planning, implementation& monitoring, people management such as communication, motivation, team building, performance management, understanding change management principles, skills in the use of health data and information, building relationships and personal leadership.
The course will be designed keeping in mind the highly complex and adaptive nature of health systems and subsystems. Healthcare got bifurcated early last century into personal health and population health. It got further bifurcated into payer and provider systems around the times of world wars. As health Information assumed greater significance with increasing system complexity, it became a subsystem on its own. As systems become complex, governance assumes high significance in bringing order into chaotic systems. Hence, it is important for personnel working the public healthcare space to have a proper understanding of how health systems functions and have the requisite skills for adopting systems thinking and a systems approach.The first course is likely to be conducted in April 2021.