Evaluating the Medical Leadership Reading Elective

Abstract

Education in leadership is an essential skill in the development of an effective physician.1 The Medical Leadership Reading Elective at Indiana University School of Medicine was created in partnership with Dr. Mitchell Tsai at University of Vermont2 to provide medical students with a mental framework on leadership and management, discuss physician burnout and resilience, and to create a vision statement as future physician leaders. The curriculum included 3 trade books and 4-8 articles weekly with a weekly 2-3 page essay assignment answering, “What does leadership mean?” and ”How will you create effective/Agile medical teams?”

Although research has been done on medical student reading rate capabilities for medical textbooks,3 it is unknown how quickly medical students can read trade books and business articles. The goal of this project was to assess whether the elective reading and writing assignments were reasonable and evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum in developing a greater understanding of medical leadership and providing tools to be an effective physician leader.