Fleming College

Effective communication skills are essential for leaders in a healthcare environment. In this course, students will enhance their understanding of leadership and management approaches in Canadian healthcare organizations. Emphasis will be placed on developing effective people management strategies, professional communication, planning, decision-making, conflict resolution, effective team building, and navigating change.

An in-depth exploration of management accounting in health care focusing on tools and techniques that develop analytical skills in finance. Theory, practical problems, and mini-cases are used to illustrate successful healthcare leadership decision-making.

Patient safety is paramount in any healthcare setting. This course will provide students with the knowledge and skills to lead quality and patient safety improvement initiatives in their roles as future leaders. Learners will explore the key sources of research and best practice evidence that organizations need to manage key patient safety and risk issues. Students will learn key fundamentals in Quality Improvement methodologies and be able to apply quality improvement strategies to relevant patient safety issues.

This course will deepen students' understanding and appreciation of the role of social determinants of health in the lives of the patients/clients they care for. Emphasis is placed on how healthcare leaders can mitigate negative impacts and increase equity in healthcare at the program development and care delivery levels. Underpinning everything is students' ability to recognize and counteract their own biases. Throughout this course, self-reflection and experiential learning will allow health professionals to develop a cultural competence component to their foundational skills.

The growth of electronic medical records, business intelligence tools, and predictive analytics requires healthcare leaders to be familiar with the benefits and risks of these tools. This course introduces the field of health informatics & computer applications for healthcare management including ways in which technology can enhance clinical care and healthcare decision making. Students will begin to analyze how data is generated, how it is used, and the importance of ensuring data quality.

Leadership and management are intertwined concepts but with distinctly different skill sets, goals, and outcomes. In this course, students will explore leadership theories and frameworks and apply these to real-world scenarios and case studies to understand how to leverage and enhance their leadership competencies to achieve the strategic and operational goals of an organization. Various tools and technologies will be explored to maximize operational efficiencies to support successful stakeholder interaction.

In this course, students will be introduced to leadership decision-making on operational effectiveness. Using case studies, students will be introduced to the multiple challenges faced by current front-line managers including environmental factors that affect operational planning, implementation, and metrics. Critical thinking, resourcefulness, and decision-making will be applied to management and leadership challenges in healthcare environments.

An introduction to effective project management based on PMI principles that provide students with the techniques to manage projects in the corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Exploring concepts from data management to predictive analytics and the role of AI, this course will explore the diverse types of analytics; and the ways that healthcare leaders can use data to understand patterns of care delivery, organizational behaviour, and patient outcomes; how to use data to communicate with decision-makers, funders, and other key stakeholders; and future trends and directions of AI and data.

This course will support students in developing their capacity for analyzing and solving the real world challenges and complexities of the national, provincial, and regional healthcare landscapes. In this course, students will look across the industry at relevant legislation and ethical frameworks to consider the ways in which they impact decision-making at the leadership level. To support continuous improvement across the sector, students will also explore examples and case studies that highlight innovative leadership strategies and effective problem-solving.

This course will provide students with an overview of common governance structures in health care and the reporting and organizational structures that underpin them. Using case studies with real world examples of common issues, students will gain an in-depth understanding of the legislative frameworks that guide formal board and Ministry reporting in various healthcare settings; the role of physicians and other key stakeholders in governance, and how these structures can enhance or limit quality improvement and change management activities.

Funding for many types of grants, contracts, and even programs can be accessed through effective proposal writing. Students will gain an understanding of how funding opportunities and challenges can impact organizational success in complex and changing contexts. Emphasis is placed on developing strategies to maximize capacity and resources to contribute to sustainable, financially responsible, and productive healthcare operations.

This course will provide students with a foundational overview of the fundamentals of HR management and look in-depth at the health human resource workforce in Canada. It will include an overview of the regulated health professions and their governing bodies and the various pieces of legislation and healthcare policy that shape the ways in which healthcare workers practice in Canada. The topics covered include hiring, supervising, and managing employee performance and development. The course will also offer a look at organizational culture with the goal of supporting psychologically safe workplaces and advancing practices for leaders to nurture healthy work environments.

This course will explore the role of innovation, partnership, and collaboration in health care to improve health in the broadest sense for individuals and populations. A range of partnership forms will be explored including, for example, formal and informal partnerships, Ministry supported integrations, joint ventures, and memorandums of understanding. Students will gain an understanding of how to form coalitions, how to manage change in a partnership context, how funding opportunities and challenges can impact collaboration, as well as how external factors can help or hinder collaboration opportunities.

Identification and management of the processes governing internal and external change are detailed in this course. Students will learn to create the proper documentation to ensure the achievement of project objectives including the principles of Agile Project Management.

This course will ask learners to critically analyze historic and current components of the Canadian and Ontario healthcare systems to address some of the systemic inequalities in the healthcare system because of colonization. To take steps towards reconciliation, learners will integrate Indigenous perspectives, values, and history to support cultural safety in healthcare. The course includes self-reflection, a major paper or project, and intensive onsite experiential learning components.

This work-integrated learning is the final component of the HCM program and represents preparation for placement and also a capstone learning experience that will provide students with an opportunity to synthesize, integrate and apply learning in a professional environment. Individual learners will have the flexibility to define a workplace project or placement (either remote, in-person, or hybrid) through a community partner, employer, or institution. Students work with WIL employers to set learning goals for themselves, monitor progress, and take advantage of networking and mentorship opportunities in order to maximize the benefit of their WIL experiences. All capstone experiences and performances will be supervised by a qualified professional or faculty member.