Career Advancement Opportunities

A cardiac nurse manager at Austin Hospital, in Heidelberg Australia, Carolyn Naismith manages a clinical team that provides diagnostic services and interventions to patients with heart disease. Naismith recently completed Harvard Medical School's Leadership in Medicine: Southeast Asia program. She says the experience equipped her with the skills needed to implement new digital technologies in her workplace and also to respond nimbly to crisis and change, including the changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, which was declared shortly after she completed the program in March 2020.

Naismith got her nursing degree in 1986 and started specializing in cardiac care during the early 1990s. She obtained a Master's degree in clinical nursing in 2004 and soon after began working in a managerial capacity. Her current position as Nurse Unit Manager at Austin Hospital's Cardiac Cath Lab comes with varied responsibilities—not only operational and clinical roles but also educational and research duties. Recently, she wanted to push herself to learn new contemporary management skills.

"I started considering an MBA, but then I found out about the Harvard Program, and it seemed like a much better fit at this stage in my career," she says.

An Interactive Approach

Offered to high-level professionals from Southeast Asia, Australia, and the Pacific, the one-year certificate program blends webinars and pre-recorded lectures with four-day residential workshops—two at Sunway University in Selangor, Malaysia, and one at Harvard Medical School in Boston. The curriculum emphasizes strategic management, organizational structure, health care finance, information technology, and other critical topics and is designed to provide the expertise health care professionals need to maintain excellence in service and patient care.

"A lot of the management training has a health care focus, and there were lots of examples of actual clinical situations and case studies to review," Naismith says. "But, we also drew on lessons from industries outside of health care that we could bring back to our practices and institutions."

A real bonus to the program, Naismith says, came with the opportunity to learn from faculty who have active working lives in hospitals. The program's director, Sayeed Malek, is Clinical Director of Transplant Surgery at Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston and also the physician lead responsible for quality improvement initiatives pertaining to all the hospital's transplant programs. Describing Malek as an "expert on teaching management theory to build teams that improve patient outcomes," Naismith adds that he is also an approachable and welcoming leader.

"Dr. Malek was calm and cool, and he always made us feel comfortable when asking questions, which was great."

Learning in Teams

The program employs a team-based approach to learning that helps to maximize educational benefits. After being allocated to groups, she and her fellow students would get together during weekly Zoom calls to work on assignments. The growing comradery between them helped to foster lasting professional relationships that Naismith says add a lot of value to the program.

"We got to learn from our medical and administrative colleagues," she says. "And that multidisciplinary approach to learning was very important given all the different roles that health care workers play. I realized that even though we were all so far away from each other, we face the same organizational challenges in trying to implement changes and deal with natural constraints. That was very revealing to me. From a professional viewpoint, we learned a lot from each other."

Putting Ideas to the Test

As part of the program, students also have to craft a proposal for a capstone project that they plan to implement in their own organizations. For Naismith, this was an opportunity to address a practical issue that she was confronting on a daily basis—how to shift to an electronic platform for documentation and data collection in the Cardiac Cath Lab. Naismith explains that it was difficult for the clinical team to extract meaningful information from the Lab's paper-based system. But writing up the capstone project, she says, made the challenge of digitizing the system easier to manage. Naismith says the new digital platform streamlines the patient's journey, adding "you don't have to repeat the same questions at every step." It also incorporates a digital display that monitors medication and radiation doses, thereby helping to safeguard patient safety.

"The capstone project helped me operationalize the project and make it real," Naismith says. "I learned how to coordinate all the various stakeholders; and the techniques that I developed from going through the Harvard program turned out to be very valuable. The faculty helped me develop the system to a stage where it was easy to implement and use in my organization."

Timely Training

The program also covered emergency preparedness and crisis management. The students learned about leadership styles that succeed in times of stress while they were attending the last residential workshop in Boston, and Naismith says the opportunity to apply what she had learned there came sooner than expected. "After the program wrapped up, I traveled to New York City for a Broadway show with friends and then flew back to Melbourne," she says. "And within a week, COVID-19 hit the world in a very big way." Austin Hospital was named a designated facility for treating COVID-19 patients, and "the training gave me a lot of confidence in terms of navigating the COVID crisis after I got home," she says. "We learned so much about managing through change in the program, and then, I got to practice that in real life very quickly."  

Naismith emphasized that it's never too late to pursue career advancement with more study. And while the process is demanding, she adds that it is also richly rewarding. "You have to commit to doing the reading and assignments to advance your own learning and also that of the others you're working with and learning from," she says. "That's how you maximize the benefits—not just from an academic standpoint, but also from the professional relationships you're building as well."

Information regarding COVID-19 has rapidly evolved. The content in this article provides a historical snapshot of events surrounding the date of posting.

Learn more about the Leadership in Medicine: Southeast Asia program.

Written by Charles Schmidt