Part three began after lunch and focused on applying the collaboration and coaching skills acquired earlier to form an action plan that would address the program’s objectives: effective communication of the healthcare team and hospital physicians serving as physician leader role-models for medical staff. Part four began the following morning with a summary of the actions necessary to meet the agreed-upon goals to fulfill the objectives and to assign participants specific tasks.

The month following the weekend retreat consisted of Phase III, known as the Presentation Phase. During this time, participants wrote the healthcare team’s documents to meet the program objectives, with coaches facilitating the process only when necessary. At the four week conclusion, the documents were presented to the remainder of the 21 member hospital physician team.

Impact of Physician Leadership Development Program

Two different sets of significant outcomes attest to the return-on-investment of the PLDP on the hospital-based physician program. The first set of outcomes concern actions that were immediately taken. The second set of outcomes concern actions that are still in the process of implementation due to their transformative nature.

The immediate outcomes originated from the action plans developed during the PLDP meeting. The program’s objectives were as follows:
Objective I: Physician-Physician Integration. Several problems areas were identified causing a lack of communication and cooperation between the hospital physician team. These problems were resolved with specific written policies generated by the coaching program’s participants. Examples of written policies to improve communication between physicians that directly improved patient care are:

1. A Patient Hand-off Policy leading to improved patient continuity of care at daily and weekly shift changes
2. A Hospital Physician On-Call Scheduling Process that clearly defined on-call responsibilities leading to full staffing for all shifts
3. A Patient Admission Process ensuring hospital physicians remained in the hospital throughout their entire 12 hour shift.