Cape Town - Groote Schuur Hospital CEO Dr Bhavna Patel recently graduated with a PhD from UCT, with research particularly focused on organisational leadership at the hospital she heads.
Dr Patel, who will be commemorating a decade as the hospital’s CEO next year, graduated on December 15. Through her PhD research, Dr Patel looked at how the hospital’s Leadership Development Programme (LDP) among the hospital’s executive leaders better capacitated their work.
Dr Patel graduated from Harold Cressy High School and thereafter pursued tertiary education at UCT for a BSc, then medicine, followed by Master’s degrees in family medicine, public health, and bioethics and health law.
She then started working at the hospital as a medical manager, then as chief of operations.
In 2013, she took over as the hospital’s CEO. The LDP initiative commenced after her appointment as CEO.
“My PhD studied the implementation of a home-grown LDP among the executive leaders at Groote Schuur Hospital, specifically analysing whether and how the programme facilitated their capacity as leaders and their continuing work to implement improvement processes across the hospital,” Patel said.
The reasoning for the study was that the LDP intended to enhance the leadership capacity of the hospital’s 16 executives and how this could foster a culture of continuous learning and improvement, through finding innovative ways in dealing with current issues facing the hospital.
“It was only in 2017 that I started thinking about studying this development as part of a PhD and while some of the aspects of the programme were conceptualised by myself, the contribution of the team to its development cannot be ignored.
“A huge challenge for me was the role that I had to play as the CEO of the hospital as well as the researcher of the study.
“Many measures were taken to ensure that the methodology was not compromised in any way. Another challenge in the progress of the study was the appearance of Covid-19, which delayed the research for two years,” Patel said.
“What we are currently doing is merely being responsive to what enters our doors, but to improve the state of healthcare in our country, we will need a more proactive rethink of how services are being provided within the larger system.
“This requires a whole-of-government and a whole-of-society approach to healthcare.”