Equity-centered leadership training found to be both relevant and impactful by interprofessional teams of health-care clinicians: recommendations for workforce-development efforts to update leadership training

We investigated the impact of training interprofessional health-care teams in equity-centered leadership skills to address health inequity and the impacts of systemic racism and other types of bias. At the time of the study, of the 131 participants enrolled, 30.5% were mental-health professionals and 10% were psychologists. In this analysis we explored the immediate reactions and self-reported learning and ability gains of attendees of intensive training retreats that make up one aspect of our 3-year training intervention. Two cohorts had fully completed the 3-year training (2016 2020) and attended six intensive retreats, allowing for analysis of their self-perceived gains in their knowledge and ability, their likelihood to use the skills gained, and their reactions to session quality, relevance, presenter effectiveness, and presenter knowledge. Participants reported overall positive reactions to the presentations and content of the sessions and reported statistically significant gains in self-perceived knowledge and ability. Pretraining knowledge scores ranged from 3.59 to 4.35 on a 7-point Likert-type scale (49.9% to 65.4% of possible), and postexposure knowledge scores ranged from 5.1 to 6.08 (72.9% to 93.3%). Ability gains followed the same trend, with preretreat scores ranging from 3.59 to 4.35 (51.3% to 62.1%) and post scores ranging from 5.06 to 6.02 (72.3% to 91.8%). Our analysis shows that short, intensive retreats conducted with interprofessional teams are efficient, impactful, relevant to the health-care professionals' needs, and a worthwhile use of providers' limited time. These results suggest that the equity-centered leadership training approach used in this program yields immediate participant-reported gains in leadership knowledge and ability. Such gains are one part of a multifaceted leadership-development program that equips clinicians with skill to address complex leadership challenges such as health disparities and the underlying structural issues that cause them.