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What is unique about À¦°óSMÉçÇø's International Masters for Health Leadership program?

• We focus on international healthcare delivery issues through management and leadership concepts, and through the lens of managerial mindsets.
• Our teaching methods bring the learnings from application to practice in real time.
• Our program integrates traditional disciplines such as strategy, organizational structure and behavior, operations management andÌýfinancial managementÌýinto our managerial mindsets, maintaining a continuous focus on healthcare leadership and management.
• We focus on how you learn, beyond what we teach.
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The Five Modules

Module 1 - The Reflective Mindset: Broadening Perspectives

The Reflective Mindset is designed to help students gain a better understanding of their personal management style - how they present themselves to others, their strengths and weaknesses, and their current leadership and management skills. Students learn how to be thoughtful and reflective, to step back from always doing, and to see familiar experiences from a new perspective.

Module 2 - The Analytic Mindset: Leading and Managing Organizations

The Analytic Mindset provides an overview of today's principal health care organizations including health promoting hospitals, community agencies, health maintenance organizations, etc. Students gain insight into the operation of these organizations by analyzing their intrinsic similarities and differences. Students are also introduced to the analytical tools, both quantitative and non-quantitative, used to manage organizations, as well as to formal approaches that improve managerial decision-making. Key concepts in financial management, people management, organizational strategy and operations management stimulate students to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of their own organization. Strategy, structure, sourcing and delivery are explored in a systematic way to allow students to view the managing process as an ongoing work of art, craft and science.Ìý

Module 3 -The Worldly Mindset: Navigating the System

The delivery of health care is rooted within highly complex systems that vary enormously across the world - from fully socialized to market-driven. Yet every system struggles with where it should sit on this continuum. Because most practitioners - whether managers or clinicians - typically spend their careers within a single system, they rarely have the opportunity to appreciate the alternatives. Our Worldly Mindset module focuses on these contextual "systems", exploring the various social institutions within the health care field and their interactions with economic, political and social forces. The goal is to increase understanding of the dynamics of "system change". Students are encouraged to seek creative solutions based on an integrated, rather than a fragmented understanding of health care. Students also explore in greater depth the interactions between economics and health, and the possibilities for leveraging change within complex systems. We analyze for improvement every health care system represented by the current cohort of students.

Module 4 - The Collaborative Mindset: Appreciating Work Relationships

In this module, students focus on managing relationships with patients, professionals, health advocates, administrators, the government, the media and many other groups. Skill development includes relationship-building, negotiating, stakeholder coordination, knowledge management and "process consulting". The work in this module relies on formal teamwork among students. The managing of professional relationships is emphasized, with students developing the advanced skills necessary to build and lead complex networks rather than simple organizations. The integration of knowledge from multiple disciplines and perspectives is also examined. We integrate with and use the NHS health system in the UK as the focal point of our work in the Collaborative Mindset module.

Module 5 - The Catalytic Mindset: Achieving Change

The final module is action-focused, integrative in nature, and geared toward the achievement of change. The projects on which students may have worked throughout the program are given considerable attention. Successful health management cases are reviewed and the action implications of adaptive management are explored. Other key areas of study include: integrated and sustainable approach to health; the notion of prevention and its applied dissemination; effective intervention within the policy environment; positive/negative outcomes of media exposure in health policy; and the notions of evaluation and accountability. Students integrate and synthesize the knowledge they have acquired during the preceding modules. The program closes with in-depth consideration of the process of transformation leadership and what it means to lead comprehensively, analytically, collaboratively, contextually, catalytically and reflectively. A concluding poster session leads the way forward to writing the final master's degree paper prior to graduation.

Program Pedagogy

Throughout the program we encourage the application to practice of the concepts, theories and frameworks used in the classroom. The IMHL pedagogy allows the learning to be applied in real time, between modules, so that managerial practices can be developed and improved during the course of the program. The program encourages participants to share their experiences, delving into each other's issues to provide innovative solutions to the challenges they face in their respective work environments. Our innovative educational activities give our experienced participants the opportunity to be the initiators of change within their organization and their community.

Particular attention is paid to the pedagogy in the program. Participants are regularly in different small discussion groups for interactive learning, but almost never in the same small group in consecutive days. A "50/50" rule allows for half the class time to be turned over to students to grapple with application to practice, in real time, of the concepts, theories and frameworks provided in class. Unique group arrangements that pay particular attention to active listening characterize the class.Ìý

The IMHL differs from traditional MBAs or MHAs in that it focuses on the connection between management and leadership, instead of the administrative functions of management. It is also mindset based instead of discipline based, meaning all disciplines are integrated within each mindset.

Every day begins with reflection — personal time for writing down thoughts and insights that have come up since the previous day, followed by discussion in small groups,Ìýand an open-ended plenary discussion.

There are three stages of Reflections: solo, small group and big circle/plenary.

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