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What if the hardest part of quality isn’t finding the right answer, but making the right action unmistakable for the people who deliver care? That’s the thread we pull with Dr. Hilary Babcock—infectious disease physician, longtime infection prevention leader, and now chief quality officer helping steer a 12-hospital system of 33,000 people through transformation without losing its soul.

We talk about learning to lead beyond subject-matter expertise and how COVID pressure-tested every leadership instinct. Hilary shares how she and her team turned dashboards into decisions, building a centralized quality hub with deep resources and a one-page “top five” for each priority so busy managers could act today. She explains why outcome views must be paired with real-time process visibility—knowing not just that CLABSIs ticked up, but exactly who is overdue for a dressing change right now—so data becomes a map rather than a mirror.

We also go inside vaccine policy and trust. BJC implemented one of the nation’s earliest influenza mandates, treating it as a safety tool within a clear accommodation process. During the COVID rollout, transparency, values, and personal candor anchored tough choices about prioritization and access. The organization’s values—kindness, respect, excellence, safety, teamwork—moved from posters to practice, and a shift to centrally led, locally embedded quality teams helped spread best practices across hospitals while protecting local relationships.

If you care about healthcare quality, leadership, and culture, you’ll leave with practical tactics and renewed optimism. Hit play, then share this with a colleague who wants to turn analytics into action. If the conversation resonated, subscribe, leave a review, and tell us the one change you’ll try this week.

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A door swinging open in the OR. A tiny defect in IV tubing. Both seem trivial—until you realize they expose how fragile our systems really are.

In this episode, Allie Muniak, Executive Director of Health System Improvement at Health Quality BC, shows how human factors turns everyday frustration into lifesaving insight. We follow her path from psychology to system redesign, uncovering how design, teamwork, and curiosity prevent harm long before checklists or policies do.

Allie explains what human factors really means in healthcare—how people, technology, and environments interact under real-world pressure. She shares how normalizing observation as learning (not policing) helped surgical teams transform the safety checklist from a compliance tool into a culture of attention, anticipation, and role clarity.

Then, a gripping case study: ICU nurses reporting spontaneous over-infusions after a new pump rollout. Rather than defaulting to “retrain the user,” a multidisciplinary team dug deeper—partnering with engineers and vendors to discover a hidden tubing defect that led to a global recall of hundreds of millions of sets. It’s a powerful example of how listening to the front line and rejecting blame can reshape safety worldwide.

We close with lessons for every leader: slow down to see work as it’s really done, balance reactive review with proactive learning, and design systems that support clinicians instead of constraining them.

If you care about real root cause analysis and systems that make the right action the easy one, this episode is for you.

🔗 Additional Resources

• Health Quality BC – Learn more about the organization’s work in system improvement and patient safety:
  ➡️ https://healthqualitybc.ca/
  
  
• Allie Muniak – Executive Director, Health System Improvement, HQBC
  ➡️ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/allisonmuniak/?skipRedirect=true
  
  ➡️ Health Quality BC: https://healthqualitybc.ca/about-us/meet-our-team/allison-muniak/
  
  

📚 Mentioned in This Episode

• The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande — the seminal book behind the global surgical safety checklist movement.
  👉 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6667514-the-checklist-manifesto
• Safety-I and Safety-II Framework (Erik Hollnagel) — foundational ideas for balancing reactive reviews with proactive learning.
  👉 https://www.england.nhs.uk/signuptosafety/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2015/10/safety-1-safety-2-whte-papr.pdf
  
  
• World Health Organization: Surgical Safety Checklist — global reference tool for surgical teamwork and communication.
  👉 https://www.who.int/teams/integrated-health-services/patient-safety/research/safe-surgery

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A small change at the bedside can ripple across an entire system. That’s the spark behind this conversation with Dr. Khalil Sivjee, Medical Director at Cleveland Clinic Canada and pulmonary–critical care physician, as we explore how data, design, and relentless measurement turn delays into decisions and anxiety into action.

We begin in the ICU, where a simple ventilator-liberation protocol challenged “that’s how we do it” and proved that even a junior clinician can drive measurable improvement. From there, Khalil zooms out to outpatient redesign—mapping the lung-cancer journey from first nodule to treatment and collapsing months-long waits by pre-ordering imaging, biopsies, and consults. Supported by EMR flags that signal when access drifts off target, this work redefines what it means to be data-driven.

We unpack “metrics that matter”—from reducing “scanxiety” through faster imaging turnaround to tracking safety events and service-line dashboards that keep teams focused on what patients actually feel. Then the conversation expands into the workplace, where Cleveland Clinic’s corporate advisory model helps companies build healthier environments through smarter design—air quality, ergonomics, mental-health screening, and on-site “pre-primary” checks that spot hypertension and diabetes early.

Finally, we look to the frontier of access: portable diagnostic kits and AI-enabled triage that bring care to students, remote workers, and underserved communities. The distance between a question and a clinical answer keeps shrinking.

The takeaway: the future of outpatient care is near-home, proactive, and measurable. Put the patient at the center, bring services to them, and measure everything that matters.
If this resonates, follow, share, and leave a review—and tell us the one metric you think every clinic should track.

🔗 Resources & Links

Guest Links

• Dr. Khalil Sivjee – Cleveland Clinic Canada Profile: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/canada/staff/sivjee-khalil
• Dr. Khalil Sivjee – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khalil-sivjee-a3021a9a/

Specific References Mentioned in the Episode

• Cleveland Clinic Canada — Official site for outpatient and corporate health programs: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/canada
• Tytocare — Remote diagnostic platform discussed in the episode: https://www.tytocare.com

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Safety isn’t a side project.  It’s the operating system. 

We sit down with Paul Lambrecht, a rare blend of front line paramedic sensibility and executive discipline, to unpack how high reliability organizing moves from idea to front line work. From standing up daily safety huddles to building a just culture where ARCC and SBAR actually get used, Paul explains how to turn near misses into gold, flatten authority gradients, and create a system where performance as intended becomes the norm.

We trace his journey through a post-merger health network that unified on a single EMR and chose safety as its identity, leading to dramatic reductions in preventable harm. Paul breaks down the five principles of high reliability—preoccupation with failure, sensitivity to operations, reluctance to simplify, deference to expertise, and commitment to resilience—and shows how to operationalize each with simple, durable tools. You’ll hear how a 20-minute, whole-house huddle can give real-time situational awareness, how a shared dashboard closes loops fast, and why top-down sponsorship paired with frontline ownership changes behavior at scale.

We also look forward. Human factors is reshaping patient safety by designing systems that make the right action the easy action—clear interfaces, standardized kits, cognitive offloading, and smarter workflows. Paul shares candid lessons on psychological safety and just culture, how to coach leaders who default to blame, and where to start if you’re resource-constrained: round for safety, mine near misses, train in ARCC and SBAR, and build reliability into daily routines.

If this conversation sparks ideas for your team, follow and share the show, leave a review to help others find it, and tell us: what’s the one safety ritual you’ll start this week?

Connect with Paul Lambrecht on LinkedIn

Additional Resources

Foundational Books

• Managing the Unexpected — Karl E. Weick & Kathleen M. Sutcliffe (Wiley). The classic HRO text outlining the five principles. 
• The Engaged Caregiver — Joseph A. Cabral & Timothy R. Clark (McGraw-Hill). Discusses the “virtuous cycle” linking safety → engagement → quality → efficiency. 
• The Fearless Organization — Amy C. Edmondson (Wiley). Psychological safety as the backbone for speaking up and graded escalation. 

Peer-Reviewed / Authoritative Articles & HRO Background

• “High-Reliability Health Care: Getting There from Here” — Mark R. Chassin & Jerod M. Loeb, The Milbank Quarterly (open access). Seminal roadmap for healthcare HROs from the Joint Commission.
• Joint Commission — High Reliability (overview, maturity model, and training). 
• NJ Hospital Association HRO Collaborative — origin of the “New Jersey Strong” safety behaviors later adapted locally (e.g., “CooperStrong”). 

Practical Tools & Frameworks

• Five Principles of HROs (Weick & Sutcliffe): Preoccupation with Failure; Reluctance to Simplify; Sensitivity to Operations; Deference to Expertise; Commitment to Resilience. (See Managing the Unexpected above.) 
• SBAR – Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation (IHI tool + PDF). 
• ARCC / ARC – Ask, Request, Concern, (Chain of Command) — graded escalation method; overviews and clinical examples. 
• STAR – Stop, Think, Act, Review — commonly included in error-prevention toolkits (organizational examples). 
• Daily Safety Huddles — Joint Commission HRO guidance for leadership behaviors that enable whole-house situational awareness. 

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As Stephen Covey once wrote, "Change happens at the speed of trust." This simple yet profound insight applied by this week's guest, Dr. Curt Smecher captures the essence of how British Columbia's Physician Quality Improvement program transformed healthcare from the ground up. Affectionately known as "Papa QI," Smecher shares the remarkable journey of creating a physician-led improvement movement that has trained over 1,600 clinicians across the province.

What makes this story exceptional isn't just the scale, but the approach. Rather than following the conventional wisdom of starting with executive buy-in, PQI began with frontline physicians and built upward. This counterintuitive strategy created a powerful foundation of clinical expertise while gradually earning administrative support through demonstrated results. The program's governance structure – with physicians, administrators, patients, and Doctors of BC as equal partners – represents a radical departure from healthcare's typical hierarchies.

Perhaps most revolutionary was the early decision to include patients as full participants in all aspects of the program. When questioned about involving patients in budgeting discussions, Smecher's response was telling: "Most of our patients know more about budgeting than our doctors do." This authentic partnership approach has been central to PQI's success and sustainability over its decade-long existence.

The program's impact extends beyond clinical improvements. Physicians trained through PQI demonstrate 40% higher engagement levels compared to their peers, suggesting that meaningful involvement in improvement work serves as a powerful antidote to burnout. Protected funding ensures resources remain dedicated to improvement rather than being diverted to immediate clinical pressures – a recognition that investing in system improvement requires dedicated space and time.

Looking ahead, Smecher describes PQI's evolution from building capacity to effectively utilizing that capacity, with the ultimate vision of "whole system quality" that addresses upstream factors rather than playing healthcare whack-a-mole. For anyone seeking to create lasting healthcare transformation, this conversation offers invaluable insights into building improvement capability that outlasts any single leader or initiative.

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What transforms a one-star hospital into a four-star institution in just four years? The answer lies not in fancy technology or complex solutions, but in approaching problems with genuine humility and data-driven focus.

Dr. Kimiyoshi Kobayashi brings a refreshing perspective to healthcare quality leadership in this illuminating conversation. As Chief Medical Officer at UMass Memorial Medical Center, he shares the critical mindset shift that helped him lead a remarkable quality transformation: "I always tried to remember when approaching somebody to approach each problem with humility." This approach—starting with curiosity rather than assumptions—has proven more valuable than any technological solution.

The discussion delves into common misconceptions about capacity command centers, revealing that despite their NASA-like appearance with monitors and co-located services, their effectiveness depends entirely on answering fundamental organizational questions. "It doesn't matter how shiny the room is," Dr. Kobayashi explains, "if you don't have difficult discussions around how decisions will be made when there are winners and losers."

For physicians transitioning into quality leadership, Dr. Kobayashi offers hard-earned wisdom from his own mistakes. He describes how his medical training conditioned him to be "answer-oriented," while leadership requires focusing on process and collaboration. This insight resonates deeply for clinical leaders who must unlearn the habit of individual problem-solving to embrace collaborative improvement.

Looking toward healthcare's future, Dr. Kobayashi envisions AI transforming quality measurement by enabling more comprehensive monitoring across all procedures and settings. Yet he maintains that human judgment will remain essential: "While data might get easier to extract, someone still has to tell the story and understand where workflows need to change."

Subscribe to Leading Quality for more conversations with healthcare leaders who are transforming patient care through innovative approaches to quality improvement.

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Dr. Lawrence Yang's powerful story begins with a stark confession: "My body had to say no for me because I didn't know how to do it myself." This candid admission sets the tone for a conversation that weaves together personal vulnerability, system transformation, and the science of hope.

As a family physician who once installed a bedroom and shower in his clinic to work longer hours, Dr. Yang's burnout journey will resonate with healthcare professionals everywhere. His turning point came through an unexpected avenue—quality improvement science—which provided both methodology and community when he needed it most. "I think quality improvement science is a science of hope," he explains, revealing how structured approaches to system problems can alleviate the moral distress that accompanies witnessing poor care experiences repeatedly.

The conversation explores British Columbia's innovative Physician Quality Improvement program, which has trained nearly 800 physicians through a unique collaboration between government and clinicians. This "silent army" represents tremendous potential for healthcare transformation, demonstrating what's possible when improvement capacity is intentionally built at scale. Dr. Yang artfully distinguishes between moral injury, moral distress, and burnout, while explaining how joy in work requires leaders to facilitate safety, purpose, autonomy, community, fairness, and recognition.

Looking toward 2030, Dr. Yang envisions primary care transformation through honest quality assessment, team-based models enabling everyone to work at top-of-scope, and transparent metrics aligned with the "sextuple aim." His advice to new clinicians cuts through professional martyrdom culture with refreshing clarity: "The system will not benefit from your martyrdom. What's in your job description is to model sustainability and wellness for your patients, colleagues, and family members."

This conversation isn't just about surviving in healthcare—it's about finding the courage to bring our full selves to the work we care about, and in doing so, creating the conditions for healthcare transformation. What might be possible if we approached system change with both vulnerability and courage? Dr. Yang's journey suggests the answer could be revolutionary.

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 Healthcare is more complex than ever — with patients seeing multiple specialists, interacting with advanced technology, and relying on coordinated teams to deliver safe, effective care. In this introductory episode, host Dr. Jason Meadows shares why he created Leading Quality and what listeners can expect. This podcast will spotlight the people — from senior leaders to frontline innovators — who are moving healthcare forward. Together, we’ll explore their stories, lessons learned, and the vision for a more connected, trustworthy, and human healthcare system.