The Future of Healthcare Leadership Education: A Consensus Vision and Research Agenda from an International Working Group

Healthcare systems worldwide face escalating complexity driven by workforce shortages, increasing patient acuity, interprofessional practice demands, and rapid technological transformation, including artificial intelligence. These pressures require leadership capacity across all levels of healthcare, yet leadership development within healthcare curricula remains inconsistent, fragmented, and variably aligned with clinical realities. Although numerous national and professional frameworks provide leadership competencies, significant heterogeneity persists in how leadership is conceptualized, implemented, and evaluated. To examine the current landscape and identify priorities for advancement, the International Leadership Association convened an interdisciplinary working group at the 2024 Healthcare Leadership Conference. Working group members represented multiple health professions, countries, and leadership development traditions. Through facilitated dialogue and collective synthesis, the group examined shared opportunities, persistent implementation challenges, and future directions for healthcare leadership education. Across contexts, working group members identified common cross-cutting themes essential to effective leadership development. Despite growing consensus regarding these domains, significant challenges limit progress, including curricular constraints, limited faculty expertise, cultural hierarchies, fragmented assessment approaches, inequitable resource distribution, and lack of consensus on meaningful outcome measures. Acknowledging gaps in knowledge and workplace constraints, our working group constructed a consensus vision for the future of leadership development for healthcare providers. This vision emphasizes leadership as a core professional value for all healthcare providers; longitudinal, developmentally aligned curricula; explicit integration of followership; systems thinking and change leadership; preparedness for digital transformation; and creation of psychologically safe organizational learning environments. The group further proposes a corresponding research and development agenda prioritizing standardized competencies, longitudinal evaluation strategies, culturally responsive leadership models, and strengthened international collaboration. Advancing leadership development across healthcare providers requires coordinated multinational efforts, evidence-informed program design, and shared success metrics.