Healthcare leadership development through associativism participation

• Autor(a) principal: Teixeira, Vera Alexandra Vaz
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/8363
• topic: Associativismo; Líder; Liderança Em Saúde; Médico Especialista; Médico Interno; Trabalho Em Equipa; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Médicas::Ciências da Saúde::Medicina

Background & Aims Incresingly, in modern healthcare doctors are required to be leaders and to know how to work in a team. Unfortunately, in most medical schools there is still no formal training of these skills, which leads to some obvious, yet unsolved medical education questions: how can doctors learn how be leaders? How can they get to be better team workers? Is there any relationship between leadership capacity and previous experiences in activities such as associativism during medical school years? First, we should analyse what the key words leadership and associativism mean, in order to better understand these questions. There are many ways to describe a leader. It can be used to describe someone who stands out, someone powerful or even someone with great achievements. In fact, none of these definitions is exclusively correct. A leader is someone who can influence others to follow him/her, and has the ability to empower others to achieve a proposed goal. Therefore, leadership is a set of skills that can only be developed with the practice of being a leader. One way to get this practice is participating in associative groups as students associations, choirs, or academic tunas, where students have to learn how to work as a team, organize their time, and develop communication skills as a leader. The goal of this study is to explore the possible relationship between participating in associativism during medical school years and the development of leadership skills, perceived in early years of doctoring Materials & Methods This is a retrospective cohort study that was conducted in five steps. Firstly, a bibliographic research was carried out to understand how much was known about the study subject. Then, two list of contacts were created: one was a list of Portuguese students bodies’ and the other was a list of physicians who did not participate in associativism. Thirdly, a questionnaire was elaborated, taken into account relevance with the subject addressed. Next, the questionnaire was distributed to the lists of contacts already drawn up through e-mail and social media pages, making the sample voluntary and of convenience, and with a request of disclosure to other physicians, which allowed a greater number of respondents. At last, the data collected was analysed using GoogleSheets® and IBM SPSS® statistics for Windows, version 23.0.. Descriptive and inferential statistics were performed, according to the pertinence of the data and the possibility of answering the questions raised by this thesis. Results For this study, 199 questionnaire responses were analised, where 152 were female (76,4) and mean age was 27,1 years old (standard deviation of 3,39). Most of the physicians participating in this study attended FCS-UBI, FMUP or FMUC. Half (50,8%) were senior residents; 37,2% were first year residents and 12,1% were specialists. Regarding the distribution into types of medical specialties, it overlaps the national reality. Depending on the answer given for the first question “Have you haver participated actively in associativism?” the study population was divided in two main cohorts: G1- physicians who participated in student groups (62,8% of the sample) and G2 – those who did not participate. 44,8% of G1 said they had stopped attending the associative group more than 2 years ago. In order to complete the second part of the questionnaire it was asked the question "For how long have you been active in your(s) association(s)?", which mode was the answer “5 – 6 years” with 30,4% of the G1 responses. Then it was asked to G1 if they were board members (G1b), or not (G1nb), on their esxtracurricular activities and 53,6% responded “yes”. Concerning G1b board positions, the most performed was “Assistant board member” with 29 responses, followed by “President” (n=21), and with 18 responses both “Treasurer” and “Other”. Physicians from G1b performed their respective board duties mostly between “1 - 2 years” (32 responses, representing 47,8% of G1b) and spent between 5 to 8 hours per week on their board duties. Results shows that 97% of G1b felt that their participation improved their academic experience and the three competencies they felt better developed due to associative participation were: “Time management” (n=46), “Public communication” (n=27) and “Commitment” (n=26). G1 showed a positive correlation with ability to “speak in public” (p=0,003), and trend towards correlation with other leadership skills, such as “feeling calm when facing an adversity” (p=0,075), “confidence when leading a team” (p=0,077) and “gain team (p=0,057). G2 also showed some correlations regarding “feeling anxious about difficult tasks” both as students and as physicians (p=0,030 and p=0,016, respectively). Within G1 group, the subgroup of students who had been board members showed a positive correlation with “volunteering to be the leader” (p=0,013), “persuade my colleagues” (p=0,041), and “feeling confident to lead a team” (p=0,018). Discussion/conclusion In this sample, physicians who took a role in student groups, especially those involved in leading those groups, showed improved confidence and leadership skills. Almost every physician from G1b recognised that their participation in associativism improved their academic jouney, Our data suggests that to be a student organization board member plays an important role in developing teamwork skills and also creates new opportunities for students to be leaders while in medical school and eventually beyond in their personal and professional lives. Since some medical schools had a small representation and the sample of physicians who did not participate in the associativism was obtained non-randomly – being a convenience sample - it is not possible to generalize the conclusions. However, conclusions regarding the study sample could be elaborated.