Perspectives of family medicine residents in Riyadh on leadership … – BMC Medical Education

In our study, we found that FM residents associate family physicians with leadership, desire more personal and system-level leadership training, and think that leadership training may be increased in the current curriculum and established in new areas.

The significant difference (p<0.001) between the Likert scale scores for the highest-ranked leadership ideal ('Family physicians should take on leadership roles in their clinical settings') and the lowest-ranked ('I am a leader') implies that there is room for growth regarding residents' development as leaders. The results are generally higher than those of other studies that used the same scale [5, 7].

In resident education, current leadership curriculum guidelines emphasize the development of lower-level leadership skills and knowledge [3]. The current curriculum has undoubtedly been significantly developed from the previous curriculum, but according to the study results, trainees still desire to learn more comprehensive leadership skills [4]. These results show that trainees' need to improve their leadership skills was greater than in the previous study in Canada [5] and similar previous studies conducted in many countries. This confirms trainees' need for more training in several leadership skills, giving the impression that a curriculum focusing more on leadership skills must be developed [7,8,9].

Conflict resolution (69%), teaching (67%), feedback, and system transformation (67%) are among the more advanced concepts that residents want to learn more about, which was higher than the need for training in Canada [5]. To account for statistical differences across domains, there was no curriculum focused specifically on leadership available at the time of this study.

There was a preference for both experiential and didactic learning opportunities. Curriculum components requiring some deliverable documents, such as leadership portfolios, were considered less desirable. This may be due to the nature and complexity of the current portfolio, which caused the trainees not to prefer it as a means of developing their leadership skills. This calls for studies to evaluate its effectiveness and ways to develop it, considering trainees' experience, opinion of development, and satisfaction.

Residents' level of agreement with several leadership ideals was unaffected by age, gender, or year of training. The desire for more training among third- and fourth-year residents is comparable to that of first- and second-year residents, which could be explained by a lack of substantial exposure to leadership domain training throughout their residency. Regarding leadership ideals, little variation existed between first- and fourth-year residents. A need may exist to provide residents with proper leadership training and competency, as there was no formal leadership training available when this poll was conducted.

Most residents (76%) indicated that leadership electives could be incorporated into the curriculum to foster leadership skills, which was higher than the percentage in Canada [5]. This may also be an opportunity to conduct studies to determine the importance of adding some new electives or rotations to the curriculum, the extent of the feasibility of some of the existing rotations and evaluate the possibility of modifying the rotations to be less lengthy and more numerous, especially after reducing the years of training in the new curriculum to three years.

Also, most residents (65%) indicated that WADAs are a part of developing their leadership skills and a good indicator for confirming the trainees' belief in the importance of this day in developing their academic skills, allowing them to evaluate the possibility of developing this day to include other skills, including leadership skills. Teaching junior learners (with training) has been suggested by most of the trainees (59%) to develop their skills, which may be a chance to consider adopting it as part of the curriculum. Overall, the percentage of residents desiring more leadership training in Saudi Arabia is higher than in Canada in all leadership domains [5].

A quantitative cross-sectional survey is the best way to get a wide range of views. In addition, only a modest number of people answered the survey. Only 30% of Riyadh's 900 residents responded to the questionnaire, which was sent to all the training centers in the city. Furthermore, due to the quantitative nature of this study, we were only able to collect a limited amount of information. One of the most pressing needs is to learn how residents view leadership and whether or not they believe family physicians should adopt a particular leadership style. Finally, there are no other local or regional studies to compare our findings to.