This winter 2025 issue of the Canadian Journal of Physician Leadership (CJPL) is an opportunity to celebrate both established and emerging approaches and perspectives. CJPL continues to publish articles that address a variety of aspects of physician leadership and related parts of health services administration, management, and more.

In an era of increasingly complex and dynamic health care systems, effective leadership is essential for driving change and improving outcomes at all levels of care — yet there is a clear gap in traditional medical education when it comes to equipping the physicians of tomorrow with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to embrace the CanMEDS leadership role. Hence, later this year, CJPL will introduce a new section on physician leadership education, including training.

The aim of this new section is to help physicians become effective leaders by collating evidence-based resources, valuable insights from experts in the field, and practical tools, with the section serving as a platform for sharing knowledge, experiences, and best practices in physician leadership education. By fostering a culture of continuous learning and professional development, we hope to inspire more physicians to take on leadership roles and drive innovation within their organizations and beyond.

This section will be at least partly grounded in the LEADS framework and will feature articles covering innovative educational methods, technology in leadership education, integration of leadership training into medical curricula, organizational case studies, challenges and barriers as well as strengths and successes, and future directions. Although the initial focus will be on physician leadership education specifically, we envision this evolving to encompass leadership education for health care professionals more broadly.

Another new addition to CJPL is a section on rural leadership, led by Dr. Giuseppe Guaiana. Dr. Guaiana is the chief of psychiatry at St. Thomas Elgin General Hospital and an associate professor in the department of psychiatry at Western University, as well as the physician leader of its Extended Campus and North of Superior programs. He has also published on mental health epidemiology and has authored systematic reviews. Dr. Guaiana will facilitate publications on rural health care and related physician and other leadership in this area, where knowledge development and exchange are much needed, especially in Canada and other countries with vast landmasses. The first article in this section appears in this issue and addresses his experience as a psychiatry leader in rural and remote Ontario.

This issue also includes learning from first-person experience in physician leadership, such as Dr. Margaret Steele’s article on clinical academic leadership; an engagement evaluation study report; another article in the health economics series led by Professor Jeffrey Hoch; and other articles, such as a commentary on governance education and training for physicians. 

We encourage our readership to submit articles and provide input on
CJPL’s content, process, style, and format. Feel free to share your comments and ideas with us or any of the CJPL team members. Your input is valuable.

Author

Abraham (Rami) Rudnick, MD, PhD, FRCPC, CCPE, CPRRP, MCIL, DFCPA, mMBA, is editor-in-chief of CJPL and professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Bioethics and the School of Occupational Therapy at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

Nikhita Singhal, MD, is associate editor and physician leadership education section lead of CJPL and a subspecialty child and adolescent psychiatry resident in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto.

Correspondence to: abraham.rudnick@nshealth.ca; harudnick@hotmail.com