Public Health Care Leadership Competencies Through the Lens of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review of What Matters in Managing Global Health Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic, although it caused a severe negative impact on health, economic, and environmental progress, underlined many gaps and opportunities, especially in health care leadership. Despite the challenging period faced during the pandemic, it was a test of leadership competencies possessed by health care leaders. As such, this article is a crisis post-mortem examination of effective leadership competencies designed to formulate crisis evidence-based traits using a scoping literature review method with a particular reference to the COVID-19 pandemic. Existing literature depicts that crisis leadership requires an amalgamation of six characteristic traits: communication, partnering/collaborations, emotional intelligence, teamwork, innovation, and accountability. Leadership can be taught and learned; as such, healthcare leaders should undergo continuous training and retraining to equip them with such skills that are mandatory during managing a crisis.