Advancing women in healthcare leadership

The healthcare sector is a major Australian employer with a 75% female workforce, yet women remain underrepresented in healthcare leadership, with leadership failing to reflect our community or workforce. Evidence shows that improvement is slow and inadequate. Research into barriers, enablers and effective models to promote gender equity in leadership, optimise career goal attainment and improve quality of working life for women in healthcare is limited. Investment is scarce, duplication rife and Australia struggles to implement and measure improvement across disciplines and at multiple levels. Monash Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre, NHMRC accredited to drive integration of research into healthcare, brings together multidisciplinary academics, health professionals, professional societies, public and private health services, community and policy makers. Here in a large scale collaborative partnership, we aim to work with key stakeholders to co-develop an evidenced based, healthcare tailored, system and policy, organisational and individual level model to promote gender equity in healthcare leadership and improve attainment of career goals for women. We will establish priorities (Delphi and nominal group techniques), explore gaps and needs, complete evidence synthesis, co-design and then implement and evaluate multi-level strategies to advance women and promote diversity in healthcare leadership. This includes co- design and evaluation of low cost, accessible, interdisciplinary capacity building and mentoring programs. We also aim to create a road map for improvement based on core measurable outcomes, supported by a cross cutting digital platform with reporting to ensure improvement can be measured and benchmarked. Ultimately, we seek to implement and scale this generalisable, evidence based, measurable improvement model with health services nationally via the Academic Health Science Centres network and our partners.