Curriculum Innovation: A Leadership Training Curriculum for Neurology Residents

Physicians assume leadership roles in health care, starting during their residency. Despite the need for skilled physician leaders, medical students and residents seldom receive training in how to lead. We aimed to create a leadership training curriculum to equip our neurology residents with knowledge and skills to lead their health care teams during residency and beyond. The learning objectives, in summary, were to improve self-awareness, demonstrate effective communication, improve conflict management, build personal sustainability, develop feedback and mentoring skills, engage in health care systems improvement, and strengthen leadership identity.

We created a 3-year leadership training program for neurology residents at State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University. Interested faculty members holding leadership positions in the Neurology Department formed the Leadership Academy faculty and developed the curriculum. Sessions included didactic presentations followed by active learning exercises, including small group discussion, writing exercises, and role-playing, followed by group reflection. We used 3 assessment tools: (1) individual session evaluation for quality control and program improvement; (2) a leadership self-assessment for physicians developed by the National Health Service (NHS), modified for relevance to residents and deployed annually to all residents; and (3) resident self-assessments conducted at the end of each academic year end-of-year assessment to collect resident's perceptions of their knowledge and leadership behaviors before and after exposure to the curriculum.

Grouping all residents together, no significant differences from year 1 to year 3 were observed on the NHS self-assessment. However, 7 residents who completed the NHS self-assessment in 3 consecutive years demonstrated statistically significant improvements in their comfort level managing conflict (p = 0.013) and in engaging with others to determine the direction of the program, department, and university (p < 0.001). Numerous statistically significant improvements in leadership knowledge and self-assessed leadership behaviors were observed in the end-of-year assessments.

We successfully implemented a leadership training curriculum for neurology residents.