Hospital leaders: To transform care, simplify your team's priorities

How would you simplify your organization's priorities?

These priorities go beyond your patients--they need to resonate with your whole team. Your patients and families will be the benefactors.

A couple of years ago, our hospital started to rally around three operational priorities. Even our definitions had to be simplified so all employees, physicians and volunteers could understand their part. After some back and forth with my colleagues, Wendy Piascik, Dr. Michael Schultz and Roger Chen, we decided on the following:

[More:]

  1. Safety: No patient, visitor or co-worker is harmed in our facilities.
  2. Flow: Patient enters and exits the system at the most opportune time.
  3. Experience: Patient feels episode of care and caring was made especially for them.

While it's not easy to get even these three priorities to resonate with 100 percent of those serving our organization, Dr. Schultz pointed out that he would know we were making progress when people were saying "safety, flow and experience" in the hallways. (Of course, I quietly asked a few staff people to make sure they approached him with these words within the first week he made his challenge). "Fake it until you become it," as I once heard quoted from Dr. Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist.

In my work, myself and fellow hospital leaders have applied key tactics to these priorities in order to:

  • Guide operations of our hospital
  • Foster and role-model wellness and prevention with the goal of creating a healthier community and reducing lifestyle-related chronic diseases
  • Improve system-wide bed capacity and patient flow efforts

As leaders, it is easy to send way too many priorities to our team--and I'm certainly guilty of this. These three operational priorities allow you to pause to ask: What are the key tactics we really want our team focused on to deliver these three priorities? This drills down below your strategies into the daily life of your team.

What are your top two to three operational priorities? Do you think if we went around your organization, your team could speak to each of these?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Scott Kashman serves as the chief administrative officer of Cape Coral Hospital, part of the Lee Memorial Health System in southwest Florida.