To be offered a professional coaching program in the corporate sector is to be valued and targeted as a potential or already high-performing individual contributor or leader. The potential for the same level of professional development investment in professional coaching, to further support and enable clinicians and other health care professionals, is slowly being realised.
Capstan Partners Medical Advisor, Dr Sarah Dalton, joined Liverpool Hospital Medical Ground Rounds to discuss coaching in healthcare. Sarah was joined by colleagues Drs Yasmin Ashraff and Tara Brown to explain; what coaching is, why it’s important, and its role in supporting clinicians during COVID-19. They also discuss positive outcomes derived from the in-hospital coaching program at Liverpool Hospital, Sydney, the CATCH program. Click here to view the full presentation.
Coaching is a conversation that allows individuals to identify and meet the goals that are important to them.
Dr Sarah Dalton, Capstan Medical Advisor
What is coaching?
Coaching relies on exploring the solutions that the coachee develops through their facilitated discussions with their coach. Coaching involves performance improvement and finding ways to achieve it through self-empowered solutions. The role of the coach is to facilitate discussion to allow the coachee to realise what they want to achieve and what they can do to achieve their goals.
This intervention style is the alternative of advice giving, as coaching draws answers from the coachee knowing and understanding themselves. The coach is there to motivate the coachee towards achieving goals, learning, and growing; allowing them to unlock their potential and maximise performance. The coachee is at the centre of all these topics, to address these issues and discover ways to overcome them.
Why be coached?
The underlying benefit of being coached is to accelerate professional development. Its purpose is to identify and address important issues a coachee is facing and for them to create solutions. What is an important issue for one clinician may or may not be an important issue for another. Coaching session goals may be related to self-limiting barriers such as discomfort with difficult conversations, managing workloads, or seeking clarity with career choices or directions. The challenges can also be more personal to the coachee including managing wellbeing, optimising meaning at work, and integrating personal life with professional life. Whether the desired development involves professional or personal goals, professional coaching is likely to help you achieve them.
Coaching in healthcare
Academic research has shown professional coaching programs can contribute to a range of positive outcomes. As reported in one key study by JAMA Internal Medicine, professional coaching reduced reported levels of emotional exhaustion. It also found that coaching improved overall quality of life, and resilience. Capstan Partner clients have also reported that their professional coaching program helped improve numerous other factors that affect quality of work and personal lives.
I feel that my leadership and personal skills have significantly improved since the beginning of the coaching. I will be recommending Capstan Partners to others.”
Director of Medical Services, Sydney
Capstan Partners have conducted a study, ‘Coaching for COVID-19: A Pilot Study Investigating the Effectiveness of Coaching to Improve Psychological Outcomes in Hospital-Based Senior Doctors’. South West Sydney Local Health District sponsored this study and partnered with the Black Dog Institute as independent researchers. Preliminary results from our research will be available soon. Click here for more background information on the study.