SPOTLIGHT ON
Kenesha
BRADLEY s the director of high reliability and patient safety at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, it’s Kenesha Bradley’s job to know the ins and outs of her department, from the perspectives of patients and clinical staff, the better to drive favorable outcomes for each within the health system. Bradley works to promote evidence-based practices and to evaluate current processes as well as efforts undertaken to improve them. She helps to position her team to take advantage of opportunities to do better in ways that bring everyone along.
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“As clinical nurse specialists, our job is being the change agents,” Bradley said. “Anybody knows that change is not always welcome and easy. It’s people management, trying to understand the bigger picture, and how to work it into actual work. It’s about recognizing opportunity and how you make those things happen.”
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OR TODAY | July 2022
Bradley is into her 14th year at Ochsner, having begun as a floor nurse working overnight shifts in the medical-surgical unit. The hospital is a community facility within the Ochsner organization, which is the largest non-profit, academic, multispecialty, healthcare delivery system in southeastern Louisiana. Even prior to the rollout of any recommendations for process improvement, Bradley spends a lot of time getting to know staff, onboarding new employees, developing a rapport with them once they’re on the floor, and helping them understand their roles within the system. Much of that work happens one-on-one, the better to help people to consider their experiences and their roles within the system prior to discussions of navigating change. For Bradley, delivering education and asking focused questions about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues in the workplace, both for patients and staff, is among the most personally significant efforts in which she’s involved. “I do a lot of talking with staff to understand their work and what it is to make change,” she said. “My biggest
passion has been in health equity and our work with diversity and inclusion. There’s a lot of work we’re doing internally, [especially around] psychological safety, which has a lot to do with people’s comfort in speaking up and taking care of their patients without fear of harm or anything happening to them.” Bradley has not only worked on such initiatives at Ochsner, but she’s also brought the lessons from her involvement in DEI issues there to a broader audience via her work with the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses (AMSN) and its DEI task force. From the hospital to the clinic, Bradley’s group has met with staff members from housekeeping to the C-suite, discussing their experience of navigating the system from provider and patient perspectives, and how free people feel to speak up when issues of concern arise. “We talked to just about everyone in our hospital to understand where everybody is coming from,” Bradley said. “That is where my heart is, making sure we’re asking the right questions, making sure we’re not biased in our care, making sure people
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