Medical Educational & Scientific Foundation of New York, Inc.

Essential Leadership: A Seminar on Practical Leadership Tools for the Working Physician

The work environment for physicians is rapidly changing. Fewer physicians are in solo practice or small groups. Physicians are aggregating into major groups and major groups are contractually affiliating with larger consortiums or major hospital organizations. A recent survey of NYS medical school students shows that the vast majority expect to work in a hospital environment either through a group contract or as directly employed attending of hospitalist physicians. The fact that fewer than 4% of hospital CEOs are physicians makes it imperative that physicians be equipped with tools to help lead hospital medial staffs in gaining voice and technical ability in their work.

The goal of the proposed Leadership seminar is to help physicians understand and deal with the realities of the new paradigm of health care delivery and how that can effectively work and thrive in the changing environment. Our program reflects the fact that medical school curricula has not changed in 50 years and that most physicians became singularly focused on a medical career at an early age. While their training has been clinically focused and intense it has not included a sound grounding in areas critical to the success of medicine as a business. Skills involving contract review and negotiations, group dynamics, communications and effective  listening/responding techniques are now essential to thriving in the new practice environment.

The new Leadership Seminar series is designed to help meet these needs. To further extend the message being developed, we are taking all the materials presented at the two seminars and reproducing them as a “train-the-trainer” package so that each attendee can use the materials to relay the leadership message to workplace colleagues. In addition we are moving forward with engaging a highly qualified video production company to tape a series of leadership lectures from other experts in the field and make them available through MSSNY’s learning management platform. These additional lectures will be produced as one hour modules and mounted on MSSNY’s learning management platform in 2018.