Activities

System In The Class: Representatives of stakeholders learn collectively, based on their specific roles across the same (healthcare) region or municipality

Action (research) Learning: Real-life programs are fundamental to our learning courses, as is continuously enlarging insights by scientific approaches

Blended Learning: Combining class-room, online, team-based, individual learning and coaching

Facing the ‘dirmi’-Paradigm

Having deep insight in oneself is a prerequisite to help re-invent the status-quo and help professions and professionals to redesign themselves. Dirmi: Who am I?

Medical ‘leadership’

Historically, healthcare is organized ‘around’ the work and role of physicians. Despite the various changes and even rapid innovations across the healthcare arena, the much contested position of the medical profession is often discussed when it comes to determinants of sustainable innovation. Institutional agency to adapt to the current shifts between professional boundaries, have resulted in the trend of ‘medical leadership’ in several countries. Not surprisingly, the two topic within these new competencies of physicians, entail ‘collaborative skills’ and ‘personal development’.

Against all odds?

A new generation of professionals, innovative content in training curricula, the modern patient and more external societal trends strongly influence healthcare professional’s make up in terms of attitude and behaviour. Unequivocally, research, field experiences and society urge us to start rethinking the modern healthcare professional. Working in an ever-changing patient-centred setting, she/he must be skilled in continuously adapting to the challenges of effectively working with a high paced stream of all kinds of people, while adequately using information and intelligent systems.

In this perspective we enter relatively new terrain of professionalism mainly based on taking initiative, speaking up and listening simultaneously, organizational sensitivity, and other social skills, while the majority of the contemporary professionals has been educated the ‘old’ way.

New Professionalism

Ancient professional culture and various unwritten rules often still dominate healthcare practise. Moreover, in general proven, evidence based healthcare innovations takes up to 15 years to be sustainably implemented. Hence, a power-contest between doing things the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ way. To overcome this impasse, change should also come from within professions itself. Maybe, physicians have taken the lead, lately, with their attempts to ‘rewrite’ their historical dominant, autocratic position, into ‘medical leadership’ (although the literature suggests that ‘nursing leadership’ appeared several years earlier).

At DIRMI we investigate novel ways to influence and facilitate modern professional agency, possible one of the most important institutional building blocks to sustainable healthcare transformation.