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Designed for busy professionals who are seeking to gain a world-class education without pausing their careers, our MBA Executive Programme Health will elevate your career in healthcare management.
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Programme overview
UCL’s Executive MBA Health offers unique opportunities to realise your ambitions in health leadership. It is a transformational programme delivered by a global top 10 university in the world’s first business school dedicated to health.
We combine world-class research-led teaching with practical business skills and expertise in healthcare leadership and management. As a UCL Executive MBA Health graduate, you will gain the competencies of a traditional MBA graduate while honing a solid theoretical and practical understanding of global healthcare systems. You will develop confidence and critical thinking skills as a reflective practitioner and leader to enhance your employability and earning potential as a change maker.
The Executive MBA Health offers applicants who are already working in the healthcare sector or wanting to pivot into the business of health the same excellent quality MBA education that our face-to-face programme offers. Additionally, the EMBA flexible on-line delivery mode supports busy professionals to learn while working full-time anywhere in the world.
Inductions
The Executive MBA begins with an on-line induction before you start your first teaching block. The induction focuses on personal, career and professional development, organisational behaviour, and team building. This induction is critical to beginning a successful EMBA journey.
During your induction, you are encouraged to complete asynchronous on-line primer courses prior to commencing the first teaching block. Topics include:
- Fundamentals of accounting, finance and economics
- Global health
- Study skills
- Time management for students
Each primer represents six hours of learning.
You will complete personality questionnaires for self-development and explore how to shape your Executive MBA experience to transform your leadership style and career goals. A professional assessment and development consultant will work with you during your induction.
Programme curriculum
The Executive MBA Health programme core content is delivered in four blocks. Each block is delivered across eight weeks of learning and worth 30 credits. A block comprises three topics plus a wrap up. Each topic and wrap up takes two weeks. During the wrap-up two weeks for each block, different topics are synthesised to integrate learning and application. As an EMBA student (i.e. part-time), you will complete two blocks in your first year and two blocks in the second year. If you choose to take the programme as a flexible student, you will work with your personal tutor to design a timeline for completing the programme that works for you. You will also complete a project in the third team of each year: the individual health consultant project in the first year and the group Global Health Challenge Project in the second year.
Each block focuses in depth on three business disciplines. The wrap up sessions for each block integrate learning and application based on real-world scenarios and case studies with discussions facilitated by health care and leadership experts from varied fields and functions.
Year 1
Year 2
The final block of the programme is made up of selected health themes to assist you in exploring specific challenges and opportunities currently faced by the health sector. Given that this module focus is on contemporary issues and opportunities, the themes of the various weeks may change overtime.
Modules
Students undertake modules to the value of 180 credits for this programme. This comprises four compulsory modules/blocks and two projects, each with a value of 30 credits.
Please note that the list of modules given here is indicative. This information is published a long time in advance of enrolment and module content and availability are subject to change to ensure that there are highly relevant and topical.
Core modules
Year 1
Term 1
- Strategy, People, and Marketing (online) - 30 credits
The focus of this module is to develop your engagement with strategic management and leadership, human resource development and marketing to amplify the vision and aims of an organisation. You’ll explore a range of strategic and operational perspectives through academic research and an examination of work based issues through case studies.
Term 2
- Finance, Economics and Data (online) - 30 credits
Designed to give you a thorough grasp of the main theories, tools, methods and techniques of financial management, health economics and healthcare analytics, you'll develop an understanding of the advantages, limitations and typical applications of each in relation to healthcare settings and practice. You will gain an appreciation of the role of financial information and data analysis within an organisation.
- UK Health System study week – Non-credit
Through this face-to-face high impact experience, students will spend one week in London exploring how the state and other private and public health-related institutions and processes influence the UK National Health Service’s performance. The module will explore the demographic and socio-economic challenges faced in the UK, particularly in terms of power and resources contested in the health sector.
Through lectures and seminars, guest speakers from across government, the NHS, charities, and the private sector will share experiences and further foster discussions to support students’ learning. There will also be several field trips to various businesses, hospitals, and ministries to engage with London's dynamic health sector.
This is a noncredit component of the EMBA which will give students the opportunity to experience the UK Health system from various angles through an experiential and action based approach.
Term 3
- Global Health Research Project (online) - 30 credits
The Global Health Research Project is a chance for you and a group of your peers to identify areas of needed health improvement through research and develop a health idea or innovation in response to this. Bringing together your learning from across the programme and through desk-based research, you’ll create an original piece of research building on the various strengths of your fellow team members.
You will work on the project in term 3 of your first year on the programme through a number of research in practice sessions to assist you with the project.
Find our more about the Global Health Research Project (insert link to the EMBA projects page)
Year 2
Term 1
- Executive Leadership (online) – 30 credits
This module covers three related themes fundamental to executive leadership – leadership style, navigating power and politics and change/innovation management. Taking a reflective approach you’ll explore the literature on these topics, but reflect on your own experiences and behaviours.
You will be introduced to key theories and approaches to leadership such as strategic versus entrepreneurial; charismatic versus transformational, distributed versus shared while also discussing and conceptionalising their application in a healthcare setting. You will explore and discuss how you navigate power relationships to get what you want and need as well as what leadership at the board level involves in terms of good governance. Issues of ethics and organisational culture and the role of change management particularly in the context of driving innovation will also be examined.
Term 2
- Contemporary Topics in Health and Healthcare - 30 credits
The focus of this module is to strengthen your knowledge of business, management and organisational principles and practices within the contemporary health sector. Considering contemporary issues, you will have to draw on and reflect upon your own experiences of organisations and share them with peers during group discussions.
The topics will be selected by the EMBA Health academic staff on an annual basis. Some of the topics that might be included are:
- Digital Health Transformation and Opportunities in Healthcare
- Social Determinants of Health
- The Business of Behavioural Health and Ageing
- Leading Change in Healthcare
- AI for Health Solutions
- Population Health Management
- Systems LeadershipYou will be asked to prioritise your five top topics. You will then be assigned three topics across the first six weeks of the module.
- Global Health System study week – Non-credit
Through this face-to-face high impact experience, students will spend one week in an overseas location exploring how a system that is not a national health system such as the UK operates and performs. The module will explore the demographic and socio-economic challenges faced in that country that impact the health system to see how it addresses the social determinants of health as well as delivering inclusive healthcare.
Through lectures and seminars, guest speakers from across the government of that country, the public health system, charities, and the private sector will share experiences and further foster discussions to support students’ learning. There will also be several field trips to various businesses, hospitals, and ministries to get a full picture of the health of the citizens and the response of the health sector in the selected country.
This is a noncredit component of the EMBA which will give students the opportunity to experience a health system outside of the UK from various angles through an experiential and action based approach. The destination for this study week will be confirmed two years in advance of the start date.
Term 3
- Health Consultant Project (online) - 30 credits
This consultancy project working for a health sector client gives you the opportunity to connect with the health sector in an area that will help shape your career and bring together what you have learned across the programme. Working independently as well as with a health organisation to shape and engage on a problem or opportunity that needs addressing, you will identify and shape the project with the client to inform your academic and professional skills for personal and professional development.
Find our more about the Health Consultant Project (insert link to the EMBA projects page)
More information about programme curriculum
This Executive MBA is an on-line programme with two study weeks included. It has been designed to give you a comparable experience to our face-to-face MBA Health students. This ensures you are awarded the same degree and connect with peers who are on a similar career journey as you.
Each of the four blocks is compatible with business disciplines and requires you to develop specific knowledge and skills on themed business topics. Each block ends with wrap-up sessions where the topics come together and are brought alive with real world scenarios and case studies presented and discussed with health experts in appropriate fields and roles. These blocks are team taught by experts in each theme who work together with a block convenor to ensure that the modules in each block are integrated.
The final block is made up of selected health themes to assist you in exploring specific challenges and opportunities currently faced in the health sector. Given that these modules will be contemporary issues and opportunities, the themes of the various weeks may change over time.
Between the second and third terms each year, you will attend a one-week study trip. In your first year of study, you will spend one week in person at the UCL East campus. This study week is an opportunity for you to meet with your peers as well as the academics and practitioners on the EMBA team. The week focuses on the two core modules you will have completed that year and give you an opportunity to take a deep dive into the UK’s National Health Service along with the private and charitable health space that exists in London. The week includes site visits, lectures, case studies and opportunities to engage with your peers and experts on key topics. In your second year, the study week in the USA (venue tbc) provides a further deep dive into a different health system.
In the third term of each year the two respective capstone projects are the Health Consultant Project and the Global Health Research Project. Project sessions in term three will help you to develop your ideas, skills and knowledge to complete these projects which should be aligned to your career goals and help to solve real-life challenges in the health care sector.
The Health Consultant project (year 1) is an individual consultant project depending on the brief in either the public, private or charitable sector working directly with an organisation. You will be tasked with delivering an individual report, the contents of which will be agreed with the module coordinator and organisation that you will be undertaking the consultancy assignment. You will work closely with your career coach to determine the best fit for your career ambitions for this project.
The Global Health Research Project (year 2) involves you working in a team with a faculty member on a healthcare research project which will be agreed between you and your supervisor. This project culminates in a group research paper and presentation due at the end of the third term.
Find out more about the Projects and Study Week Deep Dives.