To this ex-military doctor, leadership and volunteerism are must-have skills for medical students

““If we fail to produce healthcare professionals with good leadership qualities, basically, we intend for them to fail late on during their practice.” Those are the words of Brigadier General Professor Datuk Dr Mohd Arshil Moideen (Rtd), who teaches and inspires medical students as the Head of School at Monash University’s Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He was addressing a conference attended by various medical educators from Monash University and beyond. A military doctor who has been deployed 16 different times to 16 different places including Aceh in Indonesia, Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and more, he knows what he’s talking about. To him, leadership is a core competency for his profession. Doctors are expected to lead a ward, lead a group of peers, and even lead patients and their family. But junior graduates are being sent to lead a department straight away in rural hospitals, without sufficient knowledge of management and crisis resolution, and other skills in leadership. As a result, they cannot practise optimally. Studies across the globe from Qatar to England have shown have shown that medical schools dedicate little to no formal curriculum time to leadership training. This is likely as medical schools worldwide have long prioritised clinical competency amongst medical students. Meanwhile, leadership and management skills are treated as optional, peripheral, or something doctors are expected to absorb on the job. But by the time a junior doctor is handed responsibility for a ward or a rural posting, they are technically trained but organisationally unaware. They know how to treat a patient, but not necessarily how to manage a team in crisis, navigate institutional structures, or make decisions under conditions of uncertainty and resource scarcity. That’s why leadership is required – and by extension, volunteerism can help, too. How volunteerism plays a role in medical training Dr Moideen is certainly no stranger to extreme operational medicine. He’s practised in various places across the globe, and has even communicated with members of the Taliban in order to provide healthcare to locals in Afghanistan. “Real world field medicine is different – it will change the way you practise,” he says. While his experiences might be on the extreme end, he believes that medical students should be encouraged to participate in supervised, student-run free clinics. This would make for good leadership training as well, allowing them to hone their clinical decision-making, interprofessional teamwork, executive board experience, and community partnership. He also pointed out the value of social accountability in medical education. According to him, evidence shows that community engagement improves learners’ capabilities, and even creates better community impact. In other words, volunteerism also lead to improved leadership skills. A handy mnemonic on what medical students need to learn The question that the professor asks is: “How do we prepare health profession learners not just as clinicians, but as leaders and advocates who serve those most in need?” And he created an answer for that: SCRIPT HRT. It represents the values that medical students everywhere should train and embody. SCRIPT stands for the following: S: Safe, sufficient, sincere C: Caring R: Responsible I: Integrity, inclusive, and innovative P: Passionate T: Thoughtful As for HRT, these represent values that are especially important once medical students graduate and enter the work force: H: Humility, as arrogant people make the most mistakes R: Respectful, to those above and under T: Timely, the most conclusive evidence of how a medical professional approaches their work By combing all of these virtues and focuses, medical students will be able to cultivate and illustrate strong leadership skills. With that, they will be able to become better healthcare service providers, contributing to a much better healthcare system overall.

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