Evaluating medical leadership development programmes

In recent years, effective medical leadership has been recognised across healthcare as being a vital component in the saving of money, staff turnover and patient lives. Increase in the perceived importance of medical leadership has resulted in an explosion of both medical leadership development programmes and investments of public money into these programmes. These investments into medical leadership development programmes rely on the assumption and conviction that such programmes lead to significant clinical impact. The current lack of effective evaluation of these programmes leaves this an untested assumption. My research has therefore been focused on developing insights into evaluation of medical leadership development programmes. In Part I of my thesis, I establish a lack of effective evaluation methods for medical leadership development. In Part II, I establish a gap in medical leadership development in medical schools through a needs analysis and a systematic review. In Part III, I shift my focus to qualified doctors and I develop, pilot and critically appraise medical leadership development programme evaluation questionnaires. At the end of Part III, I return to programme stakeholder interviews to more carefully establish their expectations for the medical leadership development programmes and evaluations. In Part IV, to better understand the state of current research and to focus future research, I conduct a second more extensive review of studies evaluating medical leadership development programmes for qualified doctors. Finally, in Part V, I discuss limitations of this research and possible implications for evaluations and future research. One theme recurs throughout this thesis. If we want to ensure that investment into medical leadership development programmes achieves the ends that commissioners, organisations and politicians intend, we need to get better at questioning our assumptions and evaluating our investments into medical leadership development programmes. One theme recurs throughout this thesis. If we want to ensure that investment into medical leadership development programmes achieves the ends that commissioners, organisations and politicians intend, we need to get better at questioning our assumptions and evaluating our investments into medical leadership development programmes.