About the Gauteng Healthcare Leadership Programme

The Gauteng Healthcare Leadership Programme is a programme we scoped and developed with the Gauteng Government’s Minister of Healthcare for 22 senior healthcare leaders and chief executive officers. Gauteng is a province of South Africa containing the country’s largest city, Johannesburg.

Purpose of the partnership

Gauteng Government’s Minister of Healthcare wanted us to develop a programme with the following criteria:

• Postgraduate accreditation
• Work Based learning enables participants, not only to develop their leadership skills but to put these into practice and achieve significant change in their healthcare organisations and the healthcare system as a whole
• Individual and senior team development, creating a community of practice
• Context-specific learning, i.e. relevant for the healthcare system in South Africa but also learning from the NHS and other international healthcare systems.

This programme needed to be innovative as most of the delivery would be at a distance.

What we did

We designed the Gauteng Healthcare Leadership Programme which featured a one-week face-to-face residential in South Africa. This was followed up with online leadership and organisational change modules, facilitated by Lancaster University Management School tutors, group webinars with guest speakers from the NHS, personal one-to-one coaching, and several self-facilitated activities, such as visits to participants’ organisations for knowledge exchange.

Key topics in the Master Classes in the Residential and within the online learning included:

• Strategic analysis
• Leading Others Through Change
• Investigative Practices and Leading service improvement projects
• An Understanding Organisational Culture
• Understanding motivation, behaviours, values and personality traits
• Developing Resilience
• Developing Emotional intelligence

The participants were awarded a Postgraduate Certificate in Professional Practice (Healthcare Leadership) at the end of the programme.

Outcomes

The programme culminated in the presentation of participants’ service improvement projects, evidencing their application of learning on the programme to a measurable business outcome.

Our approach enabled busy senior leaders to learn online at their own pace, whilst building a learning community through video conferencing, learning sets and organisational visits. An approach of flipped learning was particularly successful, whereby the tutors prompted peer teaching within the group, developing the habit of knowledge creation and exchange to address shared organisational challenges.