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Writeup on Study Trip to Queensland Health

The office of Workplace Culture and Leadership Centre (WCLC) is located within the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital

In March, College sent a study team to Queensland Health, Australia to study their work on Leadership development. The team visited their Workplace Culture and Leadership Centre (WCLC), which was established to find out what employees think about their workplaces, help identify what needs to change, and develop leaders with the capability to make the necessary changes.

It started 4 years ago when Queensland Health was hit with a crisis, the Bundaberg Hospital incident. Insufficient rigour in the healthcare systems had led to the appointment of a surgeon Dr Jayant Patel in 2003, whose performance was later found to be questionable, and directly contributed to the death of eight patients. One of the key findings from the incident was that weak leadership had resulted in these safety and coordination lapses.

Over the four years, WCLC has done excellent work on restructuring healthcare leadership development systematically around a leadership competency framework.

Modeling after the Queensland Health’s framework, College plans to adopt a similar approach in establishing our leadership development framework and initiatives. Its Institute of Healthcare Leadership (IHL) will work on possible collaborations with WCLC and will also be re-designing our flagship leadership programmes such as the Healthcare Leadership Course (HLC) and the Young Leaders’ Programme (YLP).

The new NHG leadership development framework will be implemented from 2011, so keep a lookout!