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Leadership training refers to the process of helping individuals develop skills to successfully perform in leadership positions. Existing leadership programs have several drawbacks, including the paucity of leadership programs designed for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) individuals in health care. The authors addressed this gap by creating and hosting Q-Forward (formerly Q-Med), the first conference focused specifically on leadership development for LGBTQ+ health trainees.

In this paper, the authors explain how a conference focused on leadership development for LGBTQ+ health trainees can have benefits for trainees, patients and the health-care system. The authors also report the conference proceedings, including planning, participants, guiding principles and programming.

This conference was the first conference for LGBTQ+ health trainees focused specifically on leadership training. The authors believe that the conference was unique, and that such training represents an essential step toward long-term improvements in the health of LGBTQ+ people and other populations.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate the shifts in the theoretical conceptualization of, and the practice of leadership in health care in Canada that are happening as a response to challenges of system transformation; and the implications of those shifts for individual leaders, for health services delivery, for research into health system leadership, and for leadership development approaches in university and health agencies.

The paper begins with an analysis of the historical, contemporary, and futuristic context that shapes the conceptualization and practice of leadership now and into the future. The context consists of two parts. First, the need for leadership in health systems in Canada will be established. Second, a conceptual and practical exploration of leadership in health care, beginning with a review of the literature and moving on to exploration of two key projects pertaining to health leadership and health leadership development in Canada, commissioned by senior leaders in health care, will be analyzed for their contribution to defining leadership.

The findings outline key shifts in leadership that must take place to respond to changes in the national health environment and be pro‐active in shaping it. A typology of those shifts in order to show the constituent elements framing the evolution of leadership is outlined.

Further research on different models and approaches to leadership being promulgated in Canada, their impact on health system capacity building for change, and on new models of education for leaders, is needed.

As the speed of change in health service delivery grows, the form of leadership required to steward it in a productive fashion changes. As a lag grows between “old” models of leadership and “new” models, leaders themselves experience frustration at their ability to be effective in creating system change. This has implications for our expectations of, and ability to practice leadership; and for our developmental approaches to developing leadership.

The paper helps to explain what kind of leadership is required to truly transform health systems on a national scale. It also contributes to the international dialogue around health systems transformation, capacity building, and improving health service delivery.

The degree of remote working has increased in the health-care sector, but remote leadership in health-care contexts has not been systematically studied. Thus, the purpose of this review was to map existing literature and research themes of remote leadership in health care and identify potential research gaps to guide future studies.

A scoping review with narrative synthesis was conducted, covering all published literature addressing remote, virtual, online or distance leadership practices. The ABI/INFORM Collection, CINALH, PsycArticles, Scopus and Web of Science, MedNar, Open Grey and PQDT Open databases were searched electronically, and Finnish Journal of eHealth and eWelfare was searched manually.

In total 15 articles were included in the review. Most literature concerning remote leadership in health care has been published during the past three decades. The main themes discerned in this research stream are related to interactions, work environments, leadership in practice, use of technology and needs for more study of remote leadership and guidance for remote leaders.

Research on remote leadership in health care is limited, patchy and associated concepts vary substantially. More comprehensive research on the phenomenon is needed, with more systematic attention to, and coverage of, relevant populations, concepts, contexts and the identified themes.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this appears to be the first review to map research on remote leadership in health care and identify research gaps, which is important as its prevalence has rapidly increased.

This paper aims to extend the consideration of distributed leadership in health-care settings. Leadership is typically studied from the classical notion of the place of single leaders and continues to examine distributed leadership within small teams or horizontally. The purpose is to develop a practical understanding of how distributed leadership may occur vertically, between different layers of the health-care leadership hierarchy, examining its influence on health-care outcomes across two hospitals.

Using semi-structured interviews, data were collected from 107 hospital employees (including executive leadership, clinical management and clinicians) from two hospitals in Australia and the USA. Using thematic content analysis, an iterative process was adopted characterized by alternating between social identity and distributed leadership literature and empirical themes to answer the question of how the practice of distributed leadership influences performance outcomes in hospitals?

The perceived social identities of leadership groups shaped communication and performance both positively and negatively. In one hospital a moderating structure emerged as a leadership dyad, where leadership was distributed vertically between hospital hierarchal layers, observed to overcome communication limitations. Findings suggest dyad creation is an effective mechanism to overcome hospital hierarchy-based communication issues and ameliorate health-care outcomes.

The study demonstrates how current leadership development practices that focus on leadership relational and social competencies can benefit from a structural approach to include leadership dyads that can foster these same competencies. This approach could help develop future hospital leaders and in doing so, improve hospital outcomes.

Many nations are focussing on health care’s Triple Aim (quality, overall community health and reduced cost) with only moderate success. Traditional leadership learning programmes have been based on a taught curriculum, but the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate more modern approaches through procedures and tools.

This study evolved from grounded and activity theory foundations (using semi-structured interviews with ten senior healthcare executives and qualitative analysis) which describe obstructions to progress. The study began with the premise that quality and affordable health care are dependent upon collaborative innovation. The growth of new leaders goes from skills to procedures and tools, and from training to development.

This paper makes “frugal innovation” recommendations which while not costly in a financial sense, do have practical and social implications relating to the Triple Aim. The research also revealed largely externally driven health care systems under duress suffering from leadership shortages.

The study centred primarily on one Canadian community health care services’ organisation. Since healthcare provision is place-based (contextual), the findings may not be universally applicable, maybe not even to an adjacent community.

The paper dismisses outdated views of the synonymity of leadership and management, while encouraging clinicians to assume leadership roles.

This paper demonstrates how health care leadership can be developed and sustained.

This study aims to describe the use of action‐learning projects in 14 regional leadership development programs called public health leadership institutes.

During the period of April through August 2009, directors of the public health leadership institutes were interviewed about the action‐learning project requirement in each of their programs. Notes from these interviews, as well as relevant program materials were reviewed and summarized.

Action‐learning projects are commonly used by the public health leadership institutes to build leadership skills. However, this component of these programs varies considerably across the institutes. Frequently mentioned challenges to using action‐learning projects include lack of time for participants to meet for project work, lack of resources available for team coaching and a perceived higher value of taking action over making time for learning by many participants.

Research shows that most people develop leadership skills from actual work experiences. Action‐learning which focuses on solving complex, real‐world challenges is a common component of leadership development programs. In this paper, the authors describe how this methodology is being carried out in public health leadership institutes and recommend ways to increase the developmental return on these work experiences in public health settings.

These public health leadership programs, partially funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reach health care practitioners in 46 states and the District of Columbia. The application of best practices from these initiatives could lead to increased understanding of how to maximize the return from experiential learning initiatives designed to promote life‐long learning.

The health information management (HIM) profession lacks clarity around leadership and leadership development. To date, little empirical research exists on this topic, and it is unclear if broader approaches for healthcare leadership are suitable. This paper aims to explore which the leadership styles are relevant to the HIM profession. The findings were also used to inform a discussion on how HIM professionals could develop these leadership styles.

Through a systematic scoping literature review, deductive thematic analysis was undertaken to extrapolate common themes around this style of leadership based on transversal competency domains that reflect twenty-first century skills (i.e. critical thinking and innovation, interpersonal, intrapersonal and global citizenship) (Bernard, Watch and Ryan, 2016; UNESCO, 2015). This approach enabled the findings to be discussed from a leadership development perspective.

Analysis of the literature revealed that a relational leadership style through a team-based approach is required. Literature studies on how to develop leadership competencies were not found.

Future policy and research implications include the need for research on transversal competencies to determine if they can shape HIM leadership development.

This leadership style and competencies proposed are relevant across many occupations and may have broader applications for leadership research, education and development.

This paper defines the style of leadership required in the HIM profession and identifies a succinct set of contemporary competencies to inform the development of this type of leadership.

Strong leadership has been shown to foster change, including loyalty, improved performance and decreased error rates, but there is a dearth of evidence on effectiveness of leadership development programs. To ensure a return on the huge investments made, evidence-based approaches are needed to assess the impact of leadership on health-care establishments. As a part of a pan-Canadian initiative to design an effective evaluative instrument, the purpose of this paper was to identify and summarize evidence on health-care outcomes/return on investment (ROI) indicators and metrics associated with leadership quality, leadership development programs and existing evaluative instruments.

The authors performed a scoping review using the Arksey and O’Malley framework, searching eight databases from 2006 through June 2016.

Of 11,868 citations screened, the authors included 223 studies reporting on health-care outcomes/ROI indicators and metrics associated with leadership quality (73 studies), leadership development programs (138 studies) and existing evaluative instruments (12 studies). The extracted ROI indicators and metrics have been summarized in detail.

This review provides a snapshot in time of the current evidence on ROI indicators and metrics associated with leadership. Summarized ROI indicators and metrics can be used to design an effective evaluative instrument to assess the impact of leadership on health-care organizations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered public health vulnerabilities worldwide, particularly in the hard-hit USA. US public health professionals, regardless of role, may need to exercise leadership in both planned and unexpected situations. This model of practice outside of traditional roles, known as Public Health 3.0, requires adaptive leadership – a systems approach to making progress on complex challenges. Educational programs should improve students’ adaptive leadership competency to prepare them for the public health workforce. This paper aims to provide an educational framework for implementing adaptive leadership instruction for undergraduate students.

This paper used experiential and traditional instructional strategies and adaptive leadership competencies to develop a semester-length leadership course for undergraduate students in health, nursing, social science, business and education. Adaptive leadership principles were learned and practiced, preparing students for systemic challenges through the lens of Public Health 3.0. Competencies were assessed pre- and post-semester.

Of 248 students, 72% were health professions majors. Students reported pre-post scores on 29 measures of competency, interest, learning and behavioral change. Quantitative evaluations identified statistically significant improvement in all domains. Additional quantitative feedback indicated improvement on the three Kirkpatrick levels of evaluation assessed (reaction, learning and behavior).

Tiered evaluation methods indicated that this leadership course enhanced participants’ self-reported adaptive leadership learning and competency, as well as intention and ability to translate learning into practice. A broad spectrum of competency development is needed for students entering practice in the Public Health 3.0 era, particularly related to pandemic response.