Advancing Health System Leadership Capacity for Psychological Health and Organizational Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond

Health leaders' action during a crisis, such as COVID-19, serves to guide and support others' actions, during unpredictable health service demands. As the COVID-19 crisis continues the mental wellbeing of leaders and nurses remains strained, and made worse by nurse absenteeism, turnover, and burnout. There is no known research in Canada addressing leader and nurses' mental health and wellbeing affecting the hospital's ability to care for patients during a health crisis, post-crisis, and future health crises. This information is needed to advance post-crisis leadership strategies for health leaders to better address their own and nurses' psychological health and wellbeing while simultaneously responding to COVID-19 patients, and a backlog of patients requiring surgery and treatments. Health system leaders have a responsibility to preserve the wellbeing of nurses and ensure quality healthcare while retaining compassionate engaged and experienced nurses. In this 3-year study, our objectives include: 1) examine how leaders respond to and adapt their leadership practices in response to the COVID-19 pandemic; 2) investigate nurses perceptions, clinical challenges, work conditions and their mental health; 3) examine how leaders can promote their own and nurses' mental health to mitigate strain and burnout; 4) integrate data from objectives 1,2 and 3 to determine how leaders can promote mental health in men, women, and non-binary individuals and decrease negative outcomes to ensure hospital performance; 5) identify recommendations that build leader and nurses' mental health to ensure a healthy and diverse workforce within hospitals during the ongoing pandemic, post-crisis, and future crises. The accumulated knowledge will be shared with leaders in health services, researchers, and policy makers across Canada so that promising leadership strategies and practices can be used to improve and advance health leadership and hospital performance.