posted by admin at 2:02 pm
A client of ours recently completed our Managerial Quality program. We worked with them up front and connected a few times during the year. They had great results. Here’s the link to an article about their achievements from Nurse.com.
Our clients tend to get results like this, but that’s not the point of this entry.
The point of this post is that most of what we have been able to do to create sustainable improvement at the frontline is to create a systematic way for managers to learn how to lead their units. Achievement and accountability are much easier to attain when managers have simple principles and tools they can employ to become effective leaders.
This is a no-brainer, I know. But I’m continually surprised at how seldom organizations have a systematic way of creating ways for new managers to learn on the job. (I often hear dreams for big educational programs, but we’ve found that they’re both impractical and ineffective.)
Managers must, of course, use good judgement. To make best use of that judgement, though, we’ve found that simple, standard work for managers is essential.
posted by admin at 6:01 am
For as long as I can remember advocates of patient safety have both held the–very safe–aviation industry up as a useful analogue to health care.
But this blog entry in the WSJ calls the analogy into question. At least it calls into question the simple (simplistic) imitation of the practices of aviation that are commonly seen as solutions to many patient safety problems in health care.
posted by admin at 12:42 pm
Every leader I’ve ever talked to expresses a concern that they feel pulled in a million directions. Ask a frontline worker and they’ll say it’s more like a billion. This is made worse by the fact that there is a constant stream of “breakthrough” ideas. As a friend of mine says, “The greatest fear of a leadership team is that the CEO will read a new book.”
New processes, technologies, and ideas are essential to progress. But I assert that stability is the precondition for success of new things.
I also continually hear that leaders seek standardization. In my view, this is absolutely right. Once we create consistency we can know whether our new processes, technologies, and ideas really improve care for our patients and their loved ones.
And continual progress toward the ideal of the best outcome for every patient every time is founded on stability first.
