Public Health’s Most Influential Leader in Healthcare

HEALTHCARE

Healthcare: Public Health’s Most Influential Leader

Michael Dowling is one of the most influential public health leaders who have worked tirelessly to provide quality healthcare services for the common public. He is currently the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of Northwell Health, a nonprofit healthcare network in England.

His contribution to healthcare could be interpreted from the fact that he is named the third most influential person in healthcare (after Albert Bourla and Stephane Bancel), whereas his rank was second last year (the Olt, 2021). His name in the Modern Healthcare magazine for “100 most influential people of healthcare” for the 15th consecutive year. He has been a key contributor to the development of Northwell. He helped develop 22 hospitals, 830 ambulatory services, and regular physician practices and generated $15 billion every year. He is engaged in continuous research and development to give updated medical services to the public. After 12 years of public service, he knows that overlooking health and education matters could be a great disadvantage.

Moreover, his other marked contributions include taking a stance against gun violence, racial disparity, immigration issues, and opioid outbreak (the Olt, 2021). He has written a book called Leading through a Pandemic: The inside story of humanity, innovation, and lessons learned during the Covid-19 crisis (the Olt, 2021). The value of this book is deemed high as it instructs how to combat the pandemic based on his several years of experience, education, expertise, and knowledge of crisis management of patient care in such circumstances.

In an article, Michael Dowling himself mentioned that leadership is all about trust and the facilitation of unity (Dowling, 2021). He states that he has to conduct almost daily virtual meetings for which people must feel connected, have high collaboration even with their online presence, and be ready to take action. He believes in giving coaching and direction to his followers and becoming a source of enlightenment for them (Aguilar, 2020). He does not support only giving orders or having tight control over the subordinates. Rather he views that organizing people in unison is the key. He is a people-oriented leader and spends a lot of time with his employees. Whenever it is possible for him, he thinks that all the time should be for his people since he has to keep them motivated to do good for the public. He inspires them, gives feedback, and keeps their satisfaction levels high so that their job engagement does not go low and they remain focused on their targets (Solnik, 2017). Further, his leadership style could be comprehended as transformative as he likes to think of ways how something could be done differently for which, and he regulates the energies of his employees in the right direction. His visionary thinking has always helped motivate people toward a unified goal in his career, as his ability to distinguish leadership from management has been a successful strategy (Aguilar, 2020).

Michael Dowling is the pioneer for disability rights for children in Minnesota (Granquist, 2010). He was persistent in this purpose so that disabled children should be given benefits by the law and medical aid within school districts. Serving their disabilities was the passion that led to Dowling School in Minneapolis being named after him.

I feel I can connect with his struggles and achievements that he gained after them since he had experienced poverty and achieved the best out of it. He once cited that he has undergone the crises and epidemics of the 1980s and 90s that gave him the strength to fight his own battles (Scipioni, 2021). The confusion and hard work to work through poverty conditions, too, under unexpected circumstances of the epidemic, have given him resilience, which I think I possess. His precious learning was that he got motivation from poverty. He thinks negative things could be great motivators, which I perceive as the best sagacity advice I could ever get to know. I think that if unprecedented medical confusion arises, I should not be startled and remain focused so that I gain back my forte and be able to help people rather than lose focus and motivation. I have the power to fight against the unexpected, but I think getting motivation from negativities is the finest wisdom that Michael Dowling has dawned upon me. One more piece of advice that I found useful for myself is being exceptionally creative (Scipioni, 2021). With the advent of Covid, no one in public healthcare was equipped beforehand to combat the global pandemic. Dowling thinks that innovation could help save lives as it provides a source of coming together for humanity. I would be able to apply this suggestion in my practical life so that I am always ready to serve the common public by guiding my subordinates in the same direction proactively.