Tuesday 10 March 2026 | 15:15-16:15
Stream: Leading
Session format: World Café 

Table 1 - Next Generation Leadership: Resilient and ready: ensuring safe care during the NATO Summit: lessons from the Haga Hospital

During the NATO Summit 2025 in The Hague, the HagaZiekenhuis prepared extensively to ensure patient safety, continuity of care and strengthen overall resilience. We reinforced our crisis response structure through internal simulations and coordinated chain-wide exercises with all healthcare partners, including GPs, other hospitals, ambulance services and the GHOR (the medical assistance organization for our region). Our focus was on practising realistic cyber incident scenarios. To secure hospital accessibility, we adapted patient selection based on postal code areas. Staff were on stand-by for emergency situations and daily check-ins with all managers ensured up-to-date situational awareness. In this session we will share practical lessons, collaboration methods and how to adapt operational readiness for large-scale international events.

Josephine van der Zande Director, Acute Care Centre, Haga Hospital; Netherlands
Wieteke Cornelisse Haga Hospital; Netherlands

Table 2 - Next Generation Leadership: Students as architects of the future: building caring and resilient healthcare leaders (roles & toolkit)

Since the future of healthcare depends on nurturing both brilliance and humanity it is critically important for our future healthcare leaders to be equipped with essential tools to cope up with numerous unseen challenges.

The presentation will cover both problems and solutions with respect to the present healthcare systems and the future of healthcare leaders. In order to prepare our future healthcare leadership, we have to make sure that they are fully ready and equipped with the necessary tools to tackle the challenges and complexities of future healthcare eco system. The change in the role of doctors from just being the care providers to plan and transform the whole healthcare systems will also be discussed.

In a nutshell, our tomorrow’s healthcare professional should be future ready with diverse roles and a toolkit having essential tools such as, leadership skills, soft skills, skills for quality improvement & innovation and skills for lifelong learning. The future of healthcare is bright and exciting, but it will not be a smooth journey. The challenges facing our healthcare systems are great and the key to overcome these challenges lies in medical education and how we prepare our next generation of doctors in order to tackle these issues with diverse roles and equipped with necessary tools.

After this session, participants will be able to:

• Preparing our students for future in the context of challenges related to present and future healthcare systems.
• Different roles of health professionals and importance of having a toolkit with essential tools coping up with future uncertainties.
• Importance of technology, soft skills, innovations and quality improvement integrated in the undergraduate and post graduate medical education.
  

Yawar Hayat Khan Riphah International University; Pakistan

Table 3 - Next Generation Leadership: Ignite improvement: empowering early careers to lead change

In this interactive session, we’ll explore how we’ve successfully engaged colleagues at the very start of their healthcare journeys in quality improvement. From the initial scoping of organisational appetite to launching our first cohort, we’ll share the story of how a grassroots idea became a thriving special interest group.

You’ll hear how we co-designed quarterly development days with early-career professionals—shaping content around their real needs, aspirations, and challenges. These sessions not only build improvement capability but also empower participants to support and inspire others across the organisation.
Join us to discover practical insights, lessons learned, and the ripple effect of investing in the next generation of improvers.

This session will be of particular interest to organisations looking to build a culture of continuous improvement from the bottom up—by investing in the energy, insight, and potential of their newest team members.

After this session, participants will be able to:

• Understand how to identify and respond to early-career colleagues’ interest in quality improvement through organisational scoping and engagement.
• Explore the design and delivery of co-produced development opportunities that build improvement capability and confidence, across the network. Encouraging peer support and shared learning.
• Apply practical strategies to empower early-career staff to lead and support improvement initiatives within their team.

Anita DeHavilland Hampshire & Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust; UK

Table 4 - Next Generation Leadership: Actionable strategies to empower emerging physician leaders and trainees to advance the healthcare quality agenda

We will share international perspectives on strategies for emerging physician leaders and medical trainees to advance the quality agenda at their organizations. For early career physician leaders, we propose 10 practical and actionable strategies that can be implemented and tailored to the organization along with proposed measurement strategies to evaluate the impact of suggested approaches. We will share examples of how these strategies were implemented in different healthcare settings and resulting impact on patient care and the organizational quality agenda. Concurrently, we will share perspectives for developing QI leadership amongst residents and medical students through capability building, focusing on fostering ownership and prioritizing quality in the medical curriculum.

This session will be applicable to physicians, trainees, and the organizational team members with whom they work, to share strategies for improving collaboration and alignment in quality improvement efforts.

After this session, participants will be able to:

• Identify practical and actionable strategies that physician leaders can implement to advance the quality agenda at their organizations.
• Envision approaches to better integrate quality improvement training within medical training curricula to build tomorrow’s leaders.
• Empower peers, colleagues, and trainees to build quality improvement capability within organizations.
• Understand physician lead roles within healthcare quality groups and be better positioned to influence and lead projects.
  

Geneviève Digby Kingston Health Sciences Centre; Canada

Table 5 - Architecting a National Quality Institute: the Danish Healthcare Quality Institute (DHQI) and the future of integrated healthcare quality

Since its establishment on January 1, 2025, The Danish Healthcare Quality Institute (DHQI) has embarked on an ambitious journey to redefine national healthcare quality and patient safety. This session will unveil DHQI’s model, detailing how a new strategic framework and organizational structure (effective September 1, 2025) are driving data-based quality improvement, optimized resource allocation, and enhanced patient treatment. We will share insights into integrating clinical guidelines, patient safety database, and treatment evaluations to create synergy across healthcare quality improvement initiatives . Delegates will gain an exclusive understanding of how a national body can ignite sustainable transformation and foster a learning healthcare system.

Jens Winther Jensen The Danish Healthcare Quality Institute (DHQI); Denmark

Table 6 - Closing the knowledge loop: using data and AI to advance quality in healthcare

Over the past decades, Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) and Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) have become foundational to healthcare, shaping both clinical decision-making and policy. Yet, the integration of new evidence into practice remains slow.

Despite the rapid growth of AI and digital innovations in health and care, most fail to become integrated in daily working practices, let alone to widely scale-up. Major implementation obstacles include a lack of robust evidence on their effectiveness, added value, and safety, combined with misaligned reimbursement models and insufficient resources for implementation support and knowledge mobilization.

This session makes the case for a more systematic, evidence-based framework to guide the implementation, evaluation, and scaling of AI and data-driven technologies. By applying proven principles of evidence generation and knowledge mobilization, we can better inform decisions at all levels - from setting research & development agendas to clinical adoption to reimbursement -ensuring that only technologies with demonstrated (cost-)effectiveness and real-world impact are brought into practice.

Brent Opmeer Vilans; Netherlands
Bellis van den Berg Vilans; Netherlands

Table 7 - Measuring impact of healthcare leadership development

Effective leadership development is essential for improving patient outcomes, organisational culture, and workforce sustainability. Yet evaluations of leadership programmes often fall short of capturing what truly matters to stakeholders or informing decision-making for future investment and programme improvement. This World Café session draws on findings from two recent studies of the Oxford Emerging Leaders Programme. The first explores how evaluations can be made more useful by using utilisation-focused approaches to align measures with the needs of decision-makers, incorporating patient, organisational and individual outcomes. The second demonstrates this in practice, presenting evidence of impact on leadership skills, behaviour change, career progression, quality improvement initiatives, and organisational culture. We will explore what constitutes ‘meaningful impact’ in leadership development, how it should be measured, and how evaluations can be designed to support this.

Juliette Phillipson Thrum Leadership; UK