DEVELOPING HEALTHCARE LEADERSHIP CAPACITY IN RESOURCE POOR SETTINGS

Introduction and Objective A key challenge in delivering sustainable quality healthcare services in resource poor settings is capacity building local staff to provide effective leadership. Bwindi Community Hospital, Uganda is piloting a weekly Leadership Night School Program in an attempt to improve the personal and professional development of hospital staff. The program is open to all staff on a voluntary basis and applies adult and participatory learning methodologies. Four modules are offered: Self Leadership, Leading Others, Leading Change and Practical Skills. The objectives are to engage a minimum of 10% of staff in the program, to achieve 90% subjective participant assessment of enjoyment and usefulness, to show a subsequent 10% improvement in staff appraisal scores and 10% improvement in departmental work plan implementation scores. Method Participants provide subjective evaluation of each session. Objective output/outcome measures include staff engagement, staff annual appraisal scores and departmental work plan implementation scores. Results and Conclusions The program is on going. Preliminary results show an uptake of 10-20% of all hospital staff across all hospital departments, with 96.8% of participants rating the sessions as useful or very useful for their work and 93.5% as enjoyable or very enjoyable.