Leadership in Health Systems: A New Agenda for Interactive Leadership

Abstract

Many Systems, Many Levels, Many Leaders Leadership is about Systems and Behavior, not Individuals So What Must We Do? References In global health development circles, leadership is known to be critical for the high performance of health systems and for ensuring good population health. Yet, for a field that claims to be driven by evidence and the need to know what works, the term leadership is often used vaguely without reflecting the complexities of health systems and the real world. Moreover, much of the peerreviewed literature on health leadership focuses on individuals at the national level and their role in steering health ministries or departments. We have chaired the Advisory Group for the Flagship Report on Leadership in Health of the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research because we believe that a new agenda for health leadership is needed, one that promotes collective leadership and recognizes the range of leaders at many levels who contribute in different ways to the strengthening of health systems. We consider leadership as the ability to identify priorities, set a vision, and mobilize the actors and resources needed to achieve them. We set out below why such an agenda is important and suggest what its initial priorities might be. Clearly, this list will not be exhaustive or even applicable across the myriad health systems around the world. But we do hope that it will spark new debates on the role of leadership in health systems, on those recognized as leaders in health, and what, as a global health development community, we can do to support this.