Elizabeth Whiting, building bridges between clinicians and hospital management

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Professor Elizabeth Whiting’s PSM recognises her success in grappling with one of the biggest challenges in any hospital — bridging the gap between management and clinicians.

“Over the years, as a leader within the system, I’ve tried to enable the connection between clinicians and the leadership and also to enable shared decision-making,” she said.

Irish-born and educated, Whiting started her medical career as a geriatric advanced trainee at Brisbane’s Prince Charles Hospital in 1994.

“At that time, the tradition of medical superintendents was alive and well, so it was often senior doctors who were also leading the hospital, with varying outcomes,” she said.

Then came a new era of professional managers trained in business management and understanding KPIs but with limited or no clinical experience.

Whiting said this led to “a sort of revolving door of executive directors and CEOs with varying degrees of experience in health and leadership”.

“It got very disillusioning for a time, in terms of the connection to clinicians who had worked at the hospital for many, many years and understood what the challenges were”.

Whiting responded by pioneering the concept and design of Prince Charles’ first interdisciplinary clinical council, whose job was “to identify ways to provide a service of excellence” to hospital staff and patients.

“The idea of the council was to band together to form some stable leadership,” she says.

“When it originally came together, it was very much a medical group but it became very clear that we were in danger of doing exactly what we were concerned about, which was leaders working in silos.”

Whiting’s solution, when she became chair of the council, was to develop a partnership with the hospital’s CEO, “who, at the time was a business manager, not a clinician”.

“It’s a partnership that’s worked really well,” she says.

Whiting, now executive director of clinical services in Queensland’s Metro North Hospital and Health Service, continues to practice in her medical speciality of gerontology.

“The danger is that as a leader you get a bit disconnected from what’s actually happening on the ground,” she said.

“I still absolutely hang onto my clinical practice. I’m still on the frontline seeing patients, which I think it’s incredibly important not just for me personally but also for the system as a whole, to be able to connect up”.

Whiting’s PSM also recognises her continuing work in her specialist field.

To quote from the citation supporting her award: “One of Professor Whiting’s most significant career legacies to date is the extensive and pioneering work, advocacy and dedication to what became Metro North’s Year of the Frail Older Person (2017).

“Professor Whiting’s leadership in driving interdisciplinary care and passion for the frail older person has provided the platform for what will hopefully see Metro North as the centre of excellence in providing care to the growing population of ageing persons in Queensland.”