ACADEMIC SYMPOSIUM

This half-day symposium brings together physician leaders, health system innovators, and frontline practitioners to explore what it means to lead—and thrive—with compassion, clarity, and courage in today’s complex healthcare environment.

Each of the three panels will engage in advance scholarly work — such as surveys, scoping reviews, applied research, or case analyses — to anchor discussions in evidence. During the symposium, participants will engage in interactive formats that build on this scholarship. The collective work will culminate in peer-reviewed, publishable outputs that move beyond identifying challenges to offering hopeful, pragmatic, and evidence-informed tools. These outputs will equip leaders to help their teams, departments, and hospitals thrive in complexity and deliver exceptional, patient-centred emergency care.

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Panel 1 - Building Sustainable Leadership and Teams: The Healthy Leader, the Healthy Team

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Focus:
This stream supports leaders in creating joyful, resilient teams where individuals thrive and feel connected to a shared purpose.

This panel will explore the well-being of diverse emergency department groups, examining what contributes to collective thriving at the team level. By identifying shared patterns and contextual differences across urban, community, and rural settings, the work will highlight the key drivers of collective well-being that emergency medicine and institutional leaders can meaningfully influence. The goal is to move toward practical levers that improve day-to-day working conditions and strengthen team culture in emergency departments.

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Key Themes:

• Building positive-energy teams

• Identifying drivers of collective well-being across diverse ED contexts

• Practical tools for sustaining connection, energy, and balance in ED teams

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Output:
A scholarly paper offering pragmatic, evidence-informed recommendations to help teams thrive at individual, departmental, and system levels.
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Panel 2 - Understanding and Strengthening Leader Well-Being: From Insight to Action

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Focus:
Leadership sustainability begins with understanding the lived experiences of emergency medicine leaders. Despite growing attention to clinician wellness, little is known about the well-being of those in formal leadership roles in emergency medicine.

This stream will explore the current state of leader well-being across diverse practice settings through a structured, multicentre assessment. This initiative aims to illuminate the distinctive pressures, protective factors, and system-level influences that shape leadership sustainability.

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Key Themes:

• Understanding drivers of energy, meaning, depletion, and sustainability in leadership roles

• Identifying modifiable organizational and structural factors that influence leader wellness

• Translating insights into practical, system-level actions that support sustainable leadership

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Output:
A scholarly paper and practical guide to help departments use leader well-being data to inform targeted, system-level improvements and future collaborative research.
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Panel 3 - Psychological Safety in a Complex World: Supporting Leaders to Navigate During Challenging Times

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Preamble:
Emergency medicine leaders already carry an extraordinary burden—balancing clinical demands, operational pressures, team well-being, and increasingly complex patient needs. Yet some of the most challenging situations leaders now face are ones for which their traditional training has not fully prepared them. Sociopolitical polarization, global crises, and deeply personal value-based tensions can surface unexpectedly within teams, shaping communication, trust, and psychological safety.

This session acknowledges that leaders are doing their best in an environment that is more complex than ever. Our goal is to offer practical, compassionate tools to help them navigate difficult conversations, support their teams through emotionally charged moments, and maintain environments where people feel respected, safe, and able to work together - even when perspectives differ.

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Focus:
This stream helps leaders create respectful, caring, and inclusive environments where differences in beliefs, identities, and experiences are acknowledged with compassion and do not become sources of division—ensuring that all team members feel valued, supported, and able to work well together.

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Key Themes:

• Understanding how external pressures and societal events influence team dynamics and care environments

• Building cultures of respect, psychological safety, and compassion amid disagreement or value-based tension

• Strategies to create and sustain inclusive, steady, and supportive spaces during emotionally complex times

• Approaches to inclusive leadership that balance free expression, professional responsibility, and patient-centred care

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Output:
A scholarly paper with practical strategies and frameworks that leaders can implement to help teams stay grounded, connected, and resilient during periods of external stress.