The UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB) will this November launch a landmark executive short course that will provide Anaesthesiologists with critical business skills.
The three-day Business Acumen for Anaesthesiologists course is being offered by the UCT GSB’s highly rated Executive Education unit, and has been designed in association with the South African Society of Anaesthesiologists and Dr Peter Cruse, former Professor and Head of the Department of Anatomical Pathology at UCT, and the Chief Specialist Pathologist at Groote Schuur Hospital from 1995 - 2000.
Dr Cruse is currently CEO of Gulf Healthcare Network which provides senior clinical and risk management consultancy to the UAE’s leading healthcare providers.
The new course, running from 10 – 12 November marks the start of a partnership between Gulf Healthcare Network and the UCT GSB which aims to deliver intensive business knowledge in short courses of a few days to healthcare professionals.
The course has also been structured over a weekend to minimise the time off from clinical work and is directed at both the private and public anaesthesiology sectors.
According to Dr Cruse, recent changes in healthcare have meant that business skills have increasingly become a vital part of the daily work of doctors.
“It is now generally recognised that healthcare is resource intensive. Successful healthcare delivery to patients requires much capital, labour and medical equipment, especially in the public sector. In turn, the selection, prioritisation, coordination and mobilisation of those resources require high level organisational and management skills. Such skills are generally not taught at schools of medicine, nursing, or the allied health professions,” he said.
“South Africa is especially resource constrained in terms of the imbalance between the disease burden of the populations and the available supply of money, manpower and medical equipment to serve them. Hence we need to be especially skilled in allocating and using these scarce resources as wisely and efficiently as possible,” he added.
Dr Cruse said the skills of planning, acquiring and managing such healthcare delivery resources are best learned at business schools, but most healthcare workers do not have the opportunity or time to attend business schools.
“Hence there is a deep and wide knowledge gap, which must be closed if South Africa is to meet the healthcare needs of all its people.”
Cruse said that the first course for Anaesthesiologists will address many of the specific management challenges these professionals face today.
“Anaesthesiologists spend most of their days in the nation’s operating theatres, supporting and keeping patients alive while surgeons perform various life saving operations. They are very busy people, but have to organise and manage not only the costly drugs, medical equipment and other resources, but also their own personal finances, career and pension planning. This problem is especially acute in the private sector, where the anaesthesiologist may have to hire premises and staff to run their practices, collecting fees from patients and their medical aids and disbursing expenses like any small business,” he said.
Dr Milton Raff, a guest lecturer on the course, echoed these sentiments and added that the increasing regulation by the state in healthcare and the complexity of negotiating with the many medical aid schemes are two of the factors he believes the course will also help doctors navigate.
Dr Raff is a key part of the course’s teaching staff and offers a wealth of expertise from a senior position in the local healthcare environment – he is Vice President and Treasurer of the South African Society of Anaesthesiologists, and Chair of the finance committee of the South African Medical Association.
The new course covers a comprehensive range of business and management skills, from using professional networking, marketing and other business techniques, to understanding how to best to manage finances and use modern information technology (IT).
Dr Cruse added that the vision of the unique partnership is to help make South African healthcare practice more efficient in service delivery, using fewer resources more smartly to deliver both more and better services to patients.
To add maximum educational value for all participants, the Department of Anaesthesiology at UCT has applied for CPD/CME credits to the Health Professionals Council and appropriate certificates will be issued on completion of the course.
Dr Cruse is an Executive MBA graduate of the UCT GSB, and the recipient of a special fellowship by peer review from the Faculty of Pathology of the College of Medicine of South Africa for his services to Pathology in SA, awarded on his retirement from Academic Medicine in 2001.
He is also part of the team which recently announced a tri-continental investment agreement between GE (USA), South Africa’s Mediclinic and Dubai’s Welcare World Health Systems to create the Gulf’s largest healthcare corporation, Emirates Healthcare
For more information on the course contact Shireen Brown on (021) 406 1370 or email Shireenb@gsb.uct.ac.za. You can also visit http://www.gsb.uct.ac.za/anaesth.
