Schools for physician leaders: Teaching doctors how to champion change

State medical programs hope physicians will be catalysts for improvements in patient care, health policy and other community issues.

By Damon Adams, AMNews staff. Nov. 6, 2006.

The Medical Society of Virginia Foundation has started a new program to make today's doctors tomorrow's leaders.

Through its Claude Moore Physician Leadership Institute, the foundation wants to produce a network of physicians who work to advance health care in the state. Doctors choose to concentrate in public policy, community health, clinical care or executive management, or a combination of those areas. With training and mentoring, doctors learn to promote patient safety in the state, improve access to health care for the uninsured, manage a hospital or clinic, and push for public policy changes.

Virginia is among a growing number of states in which medical societies and their foundations offer leadership programs to teach physicians how to be community leaders. It's a growing trend in organized medicine, fueled by the societies' desire to create leaders who will take up their causes.

Medical society officials said the programs are essential because medical training does not prepare physicians to take on leadership roles.

"There are more and more needs for leaders. We've become more aware that we need to teach these skills for our organizations. Nobody else out there is doing it," said Russ Miller, senior vice president of the Tennessee Medical Assn., which will launch a leadership college next year.

The Michigan State Medical Society also will start a new program next year, when it sponsors a leadership boot camp in February 2007.

"We see a leadership vacuum developing at a time when people are looking for physicians to lead the way when it comes to health care reform," said Kenneth Edwards, MD, chair of the board of directors of the Michigan State Medical Society and an orthopedic surgeon in St. Joseph, Mich.