The Balancing Act of Clinical Leadership: Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the world of leadership. Every healthcare professional-front-line staff and leaders alike-adapted their work to confront this virus. The contributions of clinical leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic are unique and important. Experiences of clinical leadership reinforce the critical nature of leadership strategy, quality improvement principles, and commitment to integrated, whole-system quality. Clinical leaders, possessing the dual responsibility of front-line care and system-level leadership, hold critical insights regarding change in healthcare organizations as a whole. In their pandemic response, clinical leaders demonstrated key leadership characteristics that required individual growth and facilitated team cohesion: communicating with consistency and humanity;being the first to try;attending to burnout and moral injury;and building bridges to strengthen the overall response. John Kotter's landmark book, Leading Change, provides an anchoring framework for examining the experiences and strategies of clinical leaders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pandemic Response Officers: Integration Between Medical, Public Health, and Higher Education Systems to Expedite Prevention and Response.

CONTEXT: Research and policy studies alike have enumerated population and community health benefits of system integration between medical, public health, and social entities. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the necessity of a well-trained and adequately staffed public health and medical workforce in order to process SARS-CoV-2 cases and prevent subsequent transmission. Higher education systems, in particular, represented defined populations of exposure and transmission. Opportunities existed for collaboration and task sharing between institutions of higher education and local public health departments to limit spread and impacts. PROGRAM: This article describes the Pandemic Response Officer (PRO) program at Cornell University, a team of staff and students created during the intensity of the pandemic to benefit the Tompkins County and Cornell University communities. IMPLEMENTATION: The PRO program was formed in January 2021, with an original team of 8 individuals, working iteratively to investigate and support employee cases and exposures. Implementation was motivated by Cornell University's dual responsibility as a large employer that also possessed SARS-CoV-2 test results of employees. PROs loaded case information into a shared HIPPA-compliant electronic record that collected information for case notification, case investigation, isolation support, contact tracing, contact notification, and quarantine support. Over time, the PROs grew to a team of 25, gaining responsibilities as university and public health systems shared roles to maximize resources. EVALUATION: From January 1 to December 31, 2021, PROs managed 773 employee and 2943 student cases. During the Omicron surge (November 28-December 31, 2021), PROs saved the public health department an estimated 2797 hours of effort, equating to more than 10 professionals working full-time, evenings and weekends, to process cases and contacts during this interval. DISCUSSION: By integrating efforts between a university and public health agency, this intervention minimized SARS-CoV-2 transmission via expedient case support and alleviated strain on public health systems by expanding the public health workforce.