Better Never Stops - The Virginia Mason Institute Podcast

Advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in healthcare has become a strategic imperative for all leaders in healthcare. But to make lasting progress, we can’t just treat the symptoms; we must address the underlying condition, which is systemic inequity. Learn how leaders at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health have embedded equity into their improvement methods, training, and tools. 

Leading with Daily Management is an important and foundational component of ensuring patients receive quality, timely care, while providing frontline staff the information they need to effectively manage their work. Our latest episode of Better Never Stops features Neha Patel, Senior Director in Ambulatory Care at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health and Clinical Assistant Professor at University of Washington, as she shares how her teams have evolved Daily Management practices to better connect front-line leaders to executives.

Developing a culture of continuous improvement is an imperative as healthcare organizations face unprecedented challenges and strive for sustainability. Join our executive leadership panel for this roundtable discussion and learn about crucial lessons from Warwick Business School's recently published independent study of the NHS-VMI partnership. The research reveals the effectiveness of applying a systems approach to learning and improvement across five NHS trusts in partnership with NHS Improvement. Our roundtable explores crucial lessons for leaders as they work to improve patient outcomes, population health, access, equity, and the overall patient experience. Topics include:

• Leadership models, behaviors and practices that were observed to be essential components of leading change in organizations

In our second episode of Better Never Stops, Virginia Mason Institute Senior Partner Melissa Lin interviews Dana Nelson-Peterson, Vice President of Nursing Operations at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, who shares what happens when you trust a management system and improvement process to solve your toughest challenges. Dana shares her story of leading a critical part of Virginia Mason’s Covid response.

Chris Backous, Executive Partner of Transformation Services, interviews two of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health’s improvement experts, Chris Stewart and Jackie Hartke, as they share their experiences overcoming the challenge of supporting the spread of our management method across a newly expanded health system.

In this session we explore what it means to take a systems approach to healthcare equity by purposefully embedding equity concepts in improvement methods, training, and tools. We discuss practical ways to focus improvement work on the experiences of historically marginalized and underrepresented communities to support safe, culturally responsive care. We also discuss and share tools that others can immediately adopt and apply to their own work.

Improving flow in the ambulatory setting can help you tackle backlogs and increase patient access, all while improving the staff and patient experience. Learn the fundamentals of improving flow including foundational principles, methods, and routines that can help you optimize the clinical environment with simple team-led improvements.

Workforce burnout on the frontline is an urgent challenge that leaders must understand and directly address. It is imperative leaders understand the root cause, impact and opportunities to address workforce fatigue and burnout. Learn about the crucial role leaders have in creating a culture of respect and continuous improvement that engages team members and the strategies you can immediately implement to promote workforce well-being and resilience.

This is an audio recording of our webinar originally broadcast January 27, 2022. Today’s healthcare leaders face immense challenges that require a modern mindset, skills and capabilities to address growing backlogs, financial pressures, workforce disengagement and turnover. It’s time we shift our paradigm on leadership into a new perspective focused on purpose and capability, including improvement skills, effective dyad leadership and behaviors that promote meaningful team engagement.

[US Broadcast] Challenges with access and capacity are leading to increasingly long wait times for patients and exhaustion and overwhelm for our teams. With workforce resources already stretched, running harder and faster will not work. We need better ways to improve our work to reduce the burden of work and begin making immediate and sustainable improvements to reduce wait times and increase access for patients. Practical insights in this webinar will help you understand how to address access, capacity and backlogs with a unified improvement approach.