The Future of Education

Clinical leadership competencies—communication under stress, conflict management, shared decision-making, and clinician-to-clinician coordination—are increasingly required across medical and dental practice, yet training is often lecture-centred and offers limited opportunities for repeated rehearsal with standardised formative assessment. This paper presents a competency-based framework for integrating generative AI into clinical leadership education for physicians and dental clinicians, spanning clinical-stage students, residents, and continuing professional development participants. The framework is designed to be delivered as an elective extra-curricular module (simulation skills lab) that complements core curricula by developing professional and social skills through structured practice. The approach operationalises AI as bounded simulation rather than open-ended conversation: learners interact with scenario-templated patient/family roles and clinician-to-clinician handover/referral cases that include escalation and de-escalation logic. Performance is assessed via a rubric with domain scores (e.g., rapport, empathy, clarity/teach-back, conflict management, shared decision-making, professionalism, and handover quality), evidence-linked excerpts, and critical-failure rules for unsafe or unethical behaviours. A phased implementation pathway is proposed (prototype, faculty calibration, staged integration), with governance measures appropriate for EU academic settings, including synthetic-only scenarios, role-based access, retention policies, and pseudonymisation-aware analytics.