Health reform in Canada: Enabling perspectives for health leadership

Canadian healthcare leaders are experiencing unprecedented change. In Canada and worldwide, efforts are being made to create patient-centred service delivery models. In order to participate fully in that transformation, leaders must embrace the new leadership responsibilities vital to patient-centred change. To fail to do so will marginalize their role or render them irrelevant. This article reviews literature in the past 5 years to outline the change context for leaders and what they can do to enhance their effectiveness. Leaders are encouraged to redouble their efforts to develop their leadership capacity, engage physicians as partners, embrace complexity, engage the patient and public in reform efforts, and embrace appropriate technological trends within the consumer community. To reinvent leadership supportive of patient-centred change, healthcare leaders need to act individually to grow their own capacity and collectively to take control of the leadership needed in order to fulfill their role in change.