Christina Han is a program manager in South Korea's largest hospital network – the Asan Medical Centre (AMC) in Seoul.
When she was looking to expand her knowledge with first-hand experience in educational leadership and organization development, she decided to turn to Canada's premier academic health centre – UHN.
In a first-of-its-kind
Personalized Learning Program™ (PLP™), Christina spent four weeks meeting with leaders and teams across the campuses of the Michener Institute of Education at UHN and with the Human Resources' Organizational and Employee Development team.
"I quickly realized the focus on interprofessional teamwork and collaboration at UHN," Christina says. "With the learning I attained here, I hope to develop a similar structure to enable our teams to better collaborate at AMC."
AMC is an academic health sciences system that is South Korea's largest hospital network with 12,688 beds, serving more than 11,000 outpatients annually. In her capacity at the AMC Academy, Christina is responsible for a variety of education and staff development programs.
Her department also runs a scholarship program that encourages staff to visit international organizations for observerships. Through this scholarship program, AMC has sent 12 staff to participate in personalized learning programs at UHN in the past two years.
Hearing great reviews from her colleagues about the quality of their PLPs and having built a strong relationship with UHN across continents, Christina made a decision to participate in her own PLP to experience what her colleagues had during their visits to Toronto.
A first in the Personalized Learning Program
The
Personalized Learning Program™ (PLP™) has been available at UHN for nearly four years. It is a platform that has allowed for many different kinds of health professionals from around the world to visit UHN.
The PLP is a fully customizable, observership-based program designed to meet learners' specific goals and learning objectives. No two PLPs are the same.
Historically, most PLPs have been geared towards health professions, but when the UHN International Centre for Education™ (UHN ICE™) received this unique request from Christina, the team decided to create its first highly specialized program focusing on program operations in educational leadership and organization development.
The PLP was organized to meet Christina's learning objectives, which included learning from colleagues in Organization and Employee Development and Wellness, as well as from subject matter experts and leaders across Michener's campuses in Interprofessional Education, Continuing Education and Conference Services.
UHN's culture of collaboration and dedication to teaching and learning was evident throughout the coordination and delivery of Christina's PLP.
Colleagues from across UHN warmly welcomed Christina to participate in various workshops and educational sessions, including Building Optimal Outcomes from Successful Teamwork (BOOST!), Crucial Conversations, and the Caring Safely Error Prevention Toolkit.
Living Michener's ethos of "We are all teaching. We are all learning," all those involved who met Christina were also able to learn about how her programs run in a large academic health sciences centre, with eight sites spread throughout South Korea.
"It was very interesting to learn about how training and development is delivered at AMC," says Cheryl Watterson, Manager Organization and Employee Development, UHN.
"Christina shared with us some innovative ideas that support staff engagement that were implemented at her organization which would also work well here."
At the end of her program, Christina presented to hosting programs and education leadership about her learnings and provided feedback from her time spent with various teams across UHN.
"The PLP experience exceeded my expectations," Christina says. "I am committed to transferring this knowledge to my colleagues and making changes at AMC."
"The expertise and dedication I saw at UHN were remarkable and I hope to continue to work closely with UHN teams in the future."
If you are interested in learning more about PLPs, participating in one, or hearing more about Christina's experience, please contact the UHN ICE Team at
uhnice@uhn.ca.
