Learning has always been central to work and life at #Hamilton Health Sciences.  Supporting and developing our people is a key part of our strategic plan – to engage, enable and empower our people to deliver on our mission of providing excellent health care for the people and communities we serve and to advance health care through education and research.

The Hamilton Health Sciences Centre for #People Development is making a significant contribution to achieving this objective by providing staff and physicians at Hamilton Health Sciences with formal learning opportunities to help them grow and enhance their leadership ability. At Hamilton Health Sciences we believe in the notion of a leader in every chair. Leadership is not a title, it is a being: regardless of the role we all lead.

“Our staff and physician engagement surveys have underscored how much our staff and physicians value development opportunities.  The Centre for People Development, which opened in May, 2015, was built with extensive stakeholder consultation.  It was designed to provide learning opportunities that strengthen our people’s ability, individually and collectively, to perform with great ability and care with great compassion.  We live in an ambiguous and changing world, we must continue to grow, develop, think differently and be agile and adaptable”, says Andrew Doppler, Vice President, Human Resources.

Offering learning and development opportunities to staff, formal leaders and physicians, the centre offers a wide range of programming in leadership, quality and performance, compassion and resilience and team performance. Some programs include Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, Personal Power and Resilience, Leading Organizational Change and Team Simulation Based Learning focused on important clinical priorities such as early detection of sepsis.

The Centre is unique from other providers of formal development, as it incorporates the following:

• facilitators who are recognized experts in their field and also appreciate the challenges  of the health care environment
• learning that is practical, blended and focused on adult learning principles
• treats the learner as a “whole being”
• a learning environment where new learning can be practiced/applied immediately in people’s operating context
• the opportunity to network with other health care professionals across disciplines and roles
• a curriculum that reflects strategic and operational goals of the organization
• a curriculum that reflects what our people say they need and want

The Centre reflects the very latest thinking on what separates high performing leaders (formal and informal) from average leaders.  “Leaders want to get better in the here and now, not to be judged against a competency map or be sold an abstract theory about what leadership should look like….Leadership development is more about application than theory” (Warner, 2015).

Evaluations strongly indicate that the Hamilton Health Sciences Centre for People Development is delivering this type of learning, offering relevant, engaging programming that directly translates into enhanced performance.