The course will cover the knowledge domains of systems thinking and theories derived from social science, organizational theories, and psychology related to influencing transformational change and overcoming resistance to change at the clinical micro-system level and will cover a number of topic areas including: 1) A self-assessment of personal leadership skills. 2) Change management theories and application; overcoming resistance to change and modeling the environment for change. 3) Leadership strategies using cases and role playing exercises. 4) Distributive leadership for embedding and sustaining improvement and safety into practice at all levels. 5) Negotiation, coaching and conflict management. 6) Physician and other stakeholder engagement. 7) Strategic alignment of quality from the top and from the bottom. 8) Definition of knowledge translation and its application to quality improvement and safety.

Objectives: the overall course objective is to enhance individual leadership capacities and provide leadership tools for influencing organizational effectiveness around quality improvement and patient safety at the clinical microsystem level. Upon completion of this course it is expected that students will: 1) Demonstrate the integration of knowledge and application of different conceptual frameworks for basic leadership, change management, systems theories, and knowledge translation theories and competencies required to improve quality and enhance patient safety at the clinical microsystem level linked to organizational (meso) and system (macro) levels. 2) Describe their personal leadership style and explain how it relates to leading and managing change in health care at the clinical microsystem/team level. 3) Identify key leadership, change management (negotiation, coaching, and conflict management skills) and knowledge translation strategies for creating and sustaining practice/process change and innovation, including the senior leadership practices required to support and enable microsystem level improvement. 4) Understand strategic alignment of the quality and safety agenda with other key organizational priorities and initiatives. 5) Describe various strategies for engaging physicians and other stakeholders to improve quality improvement and patient safety. 6) Identify the characteristics of high-performing health care systems and judge the effectiveness of current systems in adopting and implementing these strategies.