Dr. Edyta Skibinska

In this story

1. The question that came before the classroom
2. When the first question changes the plan
3. Explaining a budget to the board
4. A student who needed a way into research
5. Taking learning into public view
6. Who carries the cost of an arrangement
7. Listening to the organisation from below
8. From a capable tool to an accountable decision
9. Learning to question the technology
10. The work of translation

The question that came before the classroom

Edyta Skibinska's account of her interest in healthcare begins with her mother. In the supplied Humans of Globe feature, she recalled being eighteen when her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. The experience brought illness into family life before healthcare became the subject of her teaching and research. She described carrying the memory of her mother's resilience into her work with students, connecting a personal encounter with disease to a professional interest in prevention.

That origin gives her educational work a particular emphasis. She wants students to understand that hospital decisions are experienced by people, even when the decisions first appear as budgets, staffing plans or operating processes. Her publications examine outsourcing, organisational leadership and artificial intelligence. Her classroom accounts concern how people learn to judge those same systems. The relationship between knowledge and responsibility runs through both.

Her present professional site describes her as a Preventive Health Strategist and Longevity Advisor. Alongside that advisory positioning is an established body of academic work carrying an American University in the Emirates affiliation. The subjects differ in scale, from an individual's health choices to the management of institutions. In her own account, they share an interest in recognising problems early and translating information into decisions someone can use.

When the first question changes the plan

In an Asia Education Review interview, Skibinska described a capstone built around an independent strategic business plan for a new healthcare facility. Each student had to connect finance, operations, regulation, quality and market analysis within one proposal. This was deliberately different from group exercises elsewhere in the programme. The final plan had to stand on the student's own reasoning.

The presentation was not reserved for the professor. Internal reviewers and invited healthcare professionals could challenge the assumptions behind it. She recalled students arriving nervous but convinced that their work was complete, only to face an expert's question they had not anticipated. A proposal that looked settled on paper suddenly had to survive the practical judgement of someone familiar with healthcare decisions.

For Skibinska, that interruption was part of the learning. The student had to defend a choice, accept criticism and reconsider an assumption without treating uncertainty as failure. She described the desired shift as moving from performing academically to thinking professionally. The test was no longer whether the student could reproduce what had been taught. It was whether the student could connect several kinds of knowledge and explain why a plan might actually work.

Explaining a budget to the board

The CIO Minds profile provides another specific view of her teaching: asking students to explain healthcare budgeting as though they were addressing a hospital board. It is an application of the teach-back method, in which learners restate a concept in their own words. The audience imagined in the exercise changes what counts as understanding. A student needs to make the reasoning clear, rather than repeat technical language that sounds correct.

The account also describes team exercises such as the Marshmallow Challenge, used to introduce constraints and collaboration. These activities sit beside more demanding policy analysis and healthcare cases. Their purpose in her classroom is to make thinking visible: how students communicate, distribute work, respond when an approach fails and connect an abstract idea with a practical task.

Her reported Healthcare Policy Analysis and Innovation Project follows a longer sequence. Students identify a public health issue, examine existing policy and develop an alternative supported by evidence. Incremental feedback, reflective writing, discussion and professional critique give them opportunities to revise their reasoning. Across these examples, Skibinska's role is active but does not remove the student's responsibility. She creates the question, offers feedback and asks the learner to make the next judgement.

A student who needed a way into research

The Humans of Globe account includes a more individual mentoring episode. A final-year healthcare management student was struggling with research and confidence. Skibinska described regular meetings, guidance on research methods, encouragement to question ideas and constructive feedback. The account ends with the student's successful completion of the project with distinction. What mattered to her was the development through the process, rather than the finished document alone.

This helps explain the attention she gives to the moment when evidence challenges an initial hypothesis. In Asia Education Review, she described research as a lesson in intellectual humility. A student can hold on to an appealing answer or change direction when the evidence requires it. For someone preparing to make decisions in healthcare, she considers that willingness to reconsider more valuable than the appearance of always being right.

Her description of mentoring is therefore aimed at independence. The educator should not become the permanent answer to every difficulty. Through questions, feedback and repeated opportunities to decide, the student should become better able to judge the next problem. In her telling, the reward is seeing a learner become confident enough to think without waiting for an expert to supply the conclusion.

Taking learning into public view

The awareness campaigns described in her published profiles give students another audience beyond the classroom. Cancer awareness and antibiotic awareness appear in the supplied feature. CIO Minds adds practical detail: students create posters, display them at the university and submit work to competitions. The assignment requires a different kind of translation from the hospital-board exercise. Here the question is how to make health information understandable to a wider community.

Her account of a Green Hospital Initiative introduces another specific project. In a Hospital Support Services Management class, students developed a proposal for making a Dubai hospital more sustainable. The published description connects the assignment with energy use, waste, procurement and other operating choices. The work was a proposal, giving students a way to consider environmental responsibility within hospital management rather than treating it as a detached topic. The same profile describes a flipped-classroom approach to sustainability: students encounter material before class, leaving the meeting for active discussion. Guest contributions from sustainability specialists introduce another perspective. The topic is therefore approached through preparation, conversation and a proposed operating plan, rather than only through a lecture about environmental values.

Visits to hospitals and clinics also appear in her teaching accounts. Students meet administrators and healthcare professionals and examine issues such as patient flow and operating processes. In the Asia Education Review interview, she recalled cohorts becoming sufficiently engaged to continue discussing cases after class and ask for longer visits. Her emphasis is on the change in their questions: less interest in a model answer, more interest in understanding a real organisation.

Who carries the cost of an arrangement

Skibinska's co-authored study with Samer Kobrossy examines outsourcing in Dubai healthcare. It asks about the services being outsourced, the reasons for doing so, the benefits and difficulties, and the interests of patients, suppliers and staff. The reported research used survey responses and interviews with people approaching the system from different positions, including hospital leadership, a ministry official and a patient with a long treatment history.

The choice of participants reflects the central concern of the paper. An arrangement that makes sense to the organisation commissioning a service may be experienced differently by employees, suppliers or patients. The authors focus on whether those interests can be aligned, rather than assuming that a lower operating burden is the only relevant measure of success.

Their proposed leadership response has three points of influence: assessing potential outsourcing firms, writing the contract and making the final selection. Stakeholder analysis, they argue, belongs before the firm is brought on board. This gives the research a close connection with Skibinska's classroom practice. It asks future managers to examine a decision across several relationships and to consider its consequences before an agreement turns an idea into an operating responsibility.

Listening to the organisation from below

A co-authored paper with Robert Karaszewski takes a different route into healthcare management: public employee and patient reviews of healthcare institutions. The study examines descriptions of destructive leadership, communication difficulties, morale and working conditions. Its qualitative approach brings attention to experiences that may not appear in a management summary of organisational performance.

The researchers used Glassdoor and Google reviews to screen institutions and examine a selected group of low-rated institutions more closely. They described coding individual reviews and comparing patterns across professional groups and rating ranges. The paper differentiates the employee view from the patient or family view, recognising that each sees a different part of the organisation. Employees may describe internal relationships that an external service user encounters only indirectly.

Skibinska and her co-author use that work to argue for transparent communication, ways to report harmful behaviour and support for both leaders and staff. They place empathy and ethical conduct within the responsibilities of management. For her wider profile, the paper adds a concrete research interest to the teaching philosophy. She is concerned with whether people can speak, how their experience is heard and what kind of leadership environment allows responsible work to happen.

From a capable tool to an accountable decision

Her authored AI review brings diagnostic, robotic and organisational applications into the same discussion, with a particular interest in healthcare implementation in the UAE. The structure is characteristic of her cross-disciplinary approach. The technology is considered alongside the people and processes required to use it, rather than as an isolated technical subject.

A later authored paper concentrates on ethical governance in clinical decision-making. It organises the discussion around algorithmic bias, physician autonomy, informed consent, accountability and the patient-provider relationship. Skibinska proposes responsibilities at three levels: the health system, the organisation and clinical practice. Her suggested mechanisms include multidisciplinary ethics oversight, checks for bias, clinician training and clear communication with patients.

At the point of care, the proposal asks for documentation of whether an AI recommendation was followed or overridden. It also places AI within shared decision-making rather than treating a system's output as a replacement for clinical dialogue. These are proposed governance arrangements. They make her intellectual position specific: technical capability does not settle who is responsible for a decision, how it should be explained or how a professional should respond when the recommendation is wrong for the circumstances.

Learning to question the technology

In the Asia Education Review interview, Skibinska argues that healthcare students should learn to question AI as well as understand it. She does not want the subject confined to a demonstration or an extra module. Her concern is how graduates interpret data, recognise limitations, weigh consequences and retain responsibility when software influences the decision in front of them.

She connects that argument with prevention. A predictive tool may affect people over a long period, while its weaknesses remain difficult to see at the moment of use. Her proposed educational response is to ask broader questions about long-term health, fairness and unintended consequences. This continues the same habit developed in the capstone presentation: challenge the assumption before accepting the answer.

A personal learning episode gives that argument another dimension. She recalled completing a lifestyle medicine certification and hearing colleagues question its relevance to healthcare management education. In her telling, it strengthened her interest in bringing prevention into management thinking. The point is not to add every new subject to the timetable. It is to decide which connections help students understand the institutions and responsibilities they will encounter, and then build those connections into how they learn.

The work of translation

Her current site gives her preventive-health approach a name: SHIFT. It brings together science, health, the individual, flourishing and time. The framework expresses her interest in understanding a person's circumstances and turning information into a plan that can be sustained. Alongside private advisory work, the site describes organisational consulting, research, teaching and public discussion as parts of the same professional direction.

The movement from public health to an individual advisory conversation does not erase her interest in systems. Across her published work, the recurring task is translation. The student must turn a theory into a defensible facility plan. The researcher must examine what an organisational arrangement means to different people. The healthcare professional must interpret a technological recommendation without surrendering judgement to it.

That is also how her mother's story connects with the classroom. A personal encounter with illness gave urgency to the subject; teaching gave her a way to help others approach it with more care. Her most concrete accounts are about people learning to ask better questions, explain their choices and revise them when necessary. Knowledge matters to her when someone can carry it into a decision, accept responsibility for that decision and remain willing to learn from what follows.