Healthcare educational leadership in the twenty-first century

Education leadership has to intimately lead our future champions of students and nurture them as professional, dynamic, reflective scholars to deal with the complex world of healthcare in a post-truth era. In addition the organization structure needs to develop faculty from clinical and educational supervisors through to program directors and Deans. Leadership theories have taken over from the previous decades of teaching on management. The current dogma is intransigent, and produces silos such as leadership and followership or leaders and managers as class differences which reinforces the obdurate and narrow-minded approach. This contradicts the open society of creating change agents, critical thinkers, and scholars of the conceptual age of post modernity who in a knowledge based economy need to take our world forward. Additionally healthcare is rapidly becoming unaffordable as returns on GDP investment do not give the returns that we as patients and tax payers need. There is the obvious waste of people and funding on constant reorganizations and short-term thinking. This reflects the sort of leaders and organizations we are developing and how decisions are made. This paper through ideas confronts the myths and flaws of current leadership teaching in an education framework. It makes the case for innovative, creative, adroit, adept, experiential learners who can see the bigger picture, avoid harm and be able to cope with complexity and uncertainty, thereby creating a paradigm shift so that future leaders can problem solve, through the ongoing seismic changes that healthcare faces.