Integrating Participants’ Work

A key principal of the program is "use work, don't make work". Participants use their actual work in the program, as opposed to fictitious case studies and theoretical events.

This approach is highly successful: experienced managers not only enjoy delving into each others' issues, but prove especially adept at doing so in a way that provides innovative solutions and strategies to the challenges participants face in their own work.

The IMHL is inviting applications from individuals.  It is also welcoming teams of managers.  Participating managers can focus their individual and group assignments on these issues and even create impact teams back-home in their organization. As such, management (individuals) development becomes organization development and community development, and the sponsoring organization gain significantly from their sponsorship of participants.

Examples of teams so far suggested are:

• a team of managers from community organizations that follow the patients, including a hospital manager concerned with the discharge and flow of patients from hospitals to community, would use the program to explore how the various health services can be knitted into a truly integrated system that serves its community
• a team of nursing managers from a major national health service would use the program to develop the full potential of nursing in integrated health care; a sixth member of this team will capture the learning in the IMHL and diffuse it to other programs within the service
• a team of community health officers from a developing region would address the pressures such managers receive from the vast diversity of initiatives coming from foundations and other donors
• managers concerned with prevention would use the program to bring greater attention to this critical aspect of health, and develop it within the context of an integrated and sustainable approach to health in a community
• an NGO team focused on a particular disease would consider their concerns in a broader context while enhancing their ability to work together and network with other health providers