22 minute read
Member Spotlights
Member Spotlight
Patrick Brown, FACHE
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What are you doing now? I’m the Vice President, Chief Operating Officer for Methodist Mansfield Medical Center, a 264-bed hospital with more than 1,300 employees and 1,000 physicians.
In your opinion, what is the most important issue facing health care today? The most important issue facing health care today is staff burnout, which has led to a labor shortage. After dealing with the pandemic for over 2 years, people are actively leaving the health care profession and the ones that remain have been burned out or are nearing burnout. I’m very concerned about the lasting impacts of this, even post-pandemic.
How long have you been a member of ACHE? I’ve been a member of ACHE for 14 years.
Why is being a member important to you? Has ACHE membership been a benefit to you in your career? Being a member of ACHE is important to me because it provides an avenue to gain real-time knowledge about relevant issues that are actively affecting health care. It is also important to me because of the networks that are created by being a part of a local chapter. Those networks have been key and beneficial to me, particularly during the pandemic, because I’ve been able to call my colleagues and see how they are handling certain issues that COVID-19 has brought up. Having this access has been extremely valuable to me. What advice would you give early careerists or those considering membership? I would tell early careerists that becoming a part of ACHE is an opportunity to make an investment in your career, profession, and in the future of health care. I truly believe healthcare leadership is a calling and that we must always be in a state of continual learning. Being a member of ACHE will help early careerists on so many levels.
Tell us one thing that people don’t know about you. I love ‘80s music!……Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, Guns & Roses, Michael Jackson, Prince, etc.
What is something people might not know about Methodist? Methodist Health System was founded 95 years ago by Methodist ministers and civic leaders to serve Dallas’s underserved neighborhoods. It started as Dallas Methodist Hospital on Christmas Eve, 1927.
Member Spotlight
Clayton Lawrence, FACHE
What are you doing now? I am honored to have just recently been promoted to Regional President at Sound Physicians where I have the privilege of serving an outstanding group of leaders and front line providers across 9 states, including Texas. I am concentrating on creating a seamless leadership transition while simultaneously seeking to cultivate a culture of service of our regional and central colleagues, front line teams, and our healthcare partners.
In your opinion, what is the most important issue facing Healthcare today? Healthcare Workers.
The pandemic and all the stress it has caused on the healthcare system and those that work within that system has forced a shift in the delivery of care while also causing thousands of healthcare workers to either leave the hospital setting or leave the healthcare setting entirely. There are studies that suggest 1 in 5 healthcare workers have left the industry since the beginning of the pandemic. As a result, there is and will continue to be a shortage of healthcare workers across all services. And that void cripples the ability to operate a hospitaly. Further the extraordinary costs associated with staffing a hospital with critical workers is unsustainable. As an industry, we must make every effort to shore up the human element of our healthcare system.
To ensure we have enough healthcare workers available, we must take steps to pull back some of those who left healthcare. We should also consider ways to streamline the education process to be more focused on turning out new graduates more efficiently while maintaining, or perhaps improving, the quality of those graduates. For example, we should look to other countries like Brazil where high schools are designed to turn out graduates who are equipped to go directly to medical school, bypassing the undergraduate years. Finally, for those that remain dedicated to the healthcare system, the industry faces a slippery slope of pulling back on compensation and safeguarding the financial health of our hospitals and other healthcare facilities and services, while at the same time ensuring those that have been highly compensated during the pandemic will accept a reset of their compensation to near pre-pandemic levels.
Why is being a member important to you? In any career, it is critical to surround yourself with the best and brightest in whatever industry you are in. I have found ACHE, and in particular, the North Texas Chapter, provides just that! As one of the nation’s largest chapters, ACHENTX has provided me the opportunity to establish professional relationships (and even friendships) that likely would not have been possible but for our local chapter.
Tell us one thing that people don’t know about you. I absolutely love world travel, which this persistent pandemic has really put a damper on. In fact, I have set foot in 5 of the 7 continents. Hopefully one day I will make it to Africa, but I do think I will bypass Antarctica – I also hate cold weather!
2022 ACHENTX BOARD OF DIRECTORS
OFFICERS:
President Dustin Anthamatten, FACHE VP, Operations Methodist Charlton Medical Center
Immediate Past President Amanda Thrash, FACHE VP of Professional & Support Services Texas Health Plano
President-Elect Felixia Colón, FACHE Sr. Vice President & Group Operations Officer SCP Health
Treasurer Aaron Bujnowski, FACHE Director (Partner) & IDN Lead The Chartis Group
Secretary Benton Sprayberry FACHE Senior Director of Operations Steward Health Care BOARD OF DIRECTORS:
Patrick Brown, FACHE Vice President & Chief Operating Officer Methodist Mansfield Medical Center
Jaquetta Clemons-Davis, FACHE
Fraser Hay, FACHE President Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Hurst-Euless-Bedford
Carolyn Hunter Chief Operating Officer Medical City Las Colinas
Valerie Johnston, PhD, FACHE Associate Professor Texas Christian University
Joseph Clayton Lawrence, FACHE Group Vice President Sound Physicians Ajith Pai, FACHE President Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Cleburne
Trinette K. Pierre, DHA, RN, NEA-BC, FACHE Executive Consultant/Advisor, Career Consultant, Professor & Unit Manager TRImani Consulting, LLC/Parkland Health & Hospital System
Keith Thurgood, PhD Professor University of Texas at Dallas
Toya White, FACHE Chief Operating Officer & Chief Nursing Officer Texas Health Resources
Mary Wylie, FACHE Vice President of Operations Baylor Scott & White Medical Center Plano
AWARD WINNERS
Early Careerist of the Year
Stephan Davis, DNP, FACHE
Senior Leader of the Year
James H. Hinton
Case Study Competition Winners The University of Texas at Dallas
Jordan Tyler Karun Joseph Rida Mahmood
Kim Cury Sairavish Akkineni
Recognitions of Exiting Board Members
Kyle Armstong, FACHE W. Scott Hurst, FACHE Thomas Peck, FACHE
Jared Shelton, FACHE Nancy Vish, FACHE
Mentor of the Year
Amber Long, FACHE
Volunteer of the Year
James Allard, FACHE
Social Media Ambassador of the Year
Jennifer “J” Alexander, FACHE
ACHENTX Diversity & Inclusion Award
UT Southwestern Medical Center
Heart of Healthcare Award
AIDS Service Center of Dallas
2021 ACHE National Recognition Awards
Kyllan Cody, FACHE Felixia Colón, FACHE W. Scott Hurst, FACHE
by Amanda Brummitt, FACHE
As healthcare leaders, we are all currently acutely aware of concerns with being able to properly staff our facilities, not to mention wanting to staff them with talented and passionate individuals that will deliver amazing patient care.
Most people in the industry chose it because they wanted to help people. We are all here for the patients. None of us would have a job if it weren’t for patients. And particularly in competitive markets like the DFW area, delivering good care alone isn’t enough to compete. We must deliver great care where patients have an excellent experience if we want to hold or grow our market share.
How do we do that? We build processes with the patient in mind first and our needs second. And we create a culture that epitomizes caring, not just for our patients, but for our team members. Processes and culture that put caring first should be a given in healthcare.
DESIGN PROCESSES AROUND WHAT IS GOOD FOR PATIENTS
Most of the way healthcare processes are designed are for the ease of the provider of healthcare. However, COVID-19 has shone a bright light on the healthcare providers that had patient friendly processes in place prior to the pandemic. They quickly rose to the top when trying to figure out how to deliver care in the challenging environment that the pandemic presented. And many others quickly re-designed their processes to be more patient friendly.
The idea of patient-centered care was introduced in the 1980s and caught on in the early 2000s after the Institute of Medicine popularized the term. But it seems like we are just now really starting to see movement towards what patients want. On the outpatient side, many providers were faced with the decision of closing their doors or figuring out how to get patients to choose them and stick with them. On the inpatient side, it’s been re-discovering how to offer care in a way that is both good for patients and safe for our own teams, and often with a shortage of staff.
We’ve made great strides towards a patient-centered experience that we should keep after this pandemic. Aside from our own convenience as healthcare providers, there is no excuse for making patients go back to the old ways. Patients should be able to schedule online, fill out forms online, check in online, wait in their car, access telemedicine when clinically proper, pay online, and access their test results and clinical information online. There’s no reason to go in for follow up on labs or imaging unless the news is something that really needs to be delivered in person. Patients don’t want to have to work to be our customers. They want it to be easy – and they deserve that.
LET’S DESIGN PROCESSES WHERE WE FIRST LOOK THROUGH THE LENS OF THE PATIENT.
The pandemic has forced some rationing of care that has had both positive and negative effects. While we don’t want to ration preventive care and screenings because that is harmful, the pandemic has illustrated that we can teach people that the Emergency Department might not be their best choice when they have cold symptoms. Even two years into the pandemic, it is surprising how much education and re-education we continue to do with people that even if they get COVID, going straight to the hospitalEmergency Room is not the solution. But it’s clear that behaviors can be changed. Proper site of service is good for everybody. It’s good for the patients. It’s good for the hospitals. It’s good for the outpatient providers. So, let’s keep this after the pandemic and continue to educate around it.
CREATE A CULTURE THAT EPITOMIZES CARING FOR OUR TEAM MEMBERS
So where is the intersection of great patient experience and being able to staff our facilities appropriately? How can we ask our teams to do more and make patients even happier when we can barely get our shifts covered? Think about good
patient experience being a good team experience. No one wants to work in an environment where we are dismissive or rude. But we can morph into that kind of environment easily when we’re busy and we’re tired and there isn’t anyone modeling how to treat patients.
It takes the same amount of time to be nice to somebody as it does to be rude. It takes the same amount of time to say something with a smile as it does with a flat affect. It takes the same amount of time to refer to somebody by their name rather than their room number. And we all know the adage that people perceive that we spent twice the amount of time with them if we sit down while we are talking to them. If these behaviors are prolific throughout the organization, our teams feel good and make our patients feel great.
We should treat our team the way we want them to treat our patients. We need to be servant leaders that are jumping in and helping. We need to do everything we can on every single shift to set our staff up to deliver the best clinical care possible. That may mean that we round to look for things people simply need our help with and jump in - and not big strategic stuff. Things like taking a blanket to Ms. Smith or a cup of water to Mr. Patel. Or, answering the phones while our Unit Secretary goes on break.
If the thought of carving out the time for this is overwhelming, ponder two things. One – what are we doing all these building projects, equipment purchases, and process improvement for if we can’t even deliver the most basic care for our patients and help our staff? Two – If we can create a culture of caring for both patients and staff, we are going to have increased volumes and increased staff retention. What happens if we don’t?
And, as we are adding to our to-do lists, let’s put the mental health of our caregivers on it. They are exhausted and living in a system that was stressed long before the pandemic. What do we have in place to check on them, to allow them to decompress, to give them respite? And what do we do post-pandemic to create organizations that allow them to thrive and be ready for the next one?
We must create cultures where people fall in love with healthcare again, fall in love with providing exceptional clinical care, and fall in love with delivering excellent patient experience. It starts at the top and it must be prolific throughout our entire organizational culture.
By Barbara Anspach, FACHE
It is nearly impossible to read any health care publication today without seeing reference to ‘The Great Resignation’, the voluntary mass exodus of employees from the workforce since early 2021. Most experts attribute this phenomenon largely to COVID-19 and associated economic factors. Some experts likened it to a general strike. At the heart of this trend are individuals who, for their own personal and specific reasons, have decided that the traditional ways in which we work are no longer appealing or practical. In the United States, a country typically driven by a desire to prosper in a free market economy, people have stepped back and taken a hard look at the tradeoffs they’ve been making for the sake of career and wages. They have reassessed the value of working long hours with rigid schedules for employers who offer few options outside of traditional work opportunities. The Great Resignation hit the healthcare sector particularly hard and forward-thinking leaders and business entrepreneurs are increasingly rising to the challenge of solving for work-life balance, offering innovative and well-funded strategies for re-engaging the workforce.
Current State PricewaterhouseCooper’s first Pulse Survey of 2022 reports that business leaders faced with realizing profitable growth, managing eroding margins and confronting escalating costs are increasing investments in what they see as top drivers of growth this year. According to the survey, the most critical growth driver across industries is the ability to hire and retain talent, with 77 percent of respondents ranking this as their top priority, followed by digital strategies (60 percent). Less than one-third of those surveyed expect talent shortages to ease this year. Health industry leaders’ areas of investment include digital transformation (63 percent) and talent retention (55 percent). These are followed closely (53 percent) by the drive to create new products and services in response to changing consumer behavior. Executives are investing in their workforce with 62 percent increasing compensation for employees through bonuses and cost-of-living adjustments and 56 percent changing processes to address labor shortages. Talent shortage is listed as the top business risk in 2022 with supply chain disruption a distant second. Survey respondents see labor costs as the factor having the most impact on margins. Executive views on business in 2022: PwC
Strategies for Workforce Engagement Healthcare leaders and experts have identified a variety of strategies worth considering to address today’s workforce challenges. Some key strategy ‘must haves’ include: • C-suite unity around talent management strategies Having enterprise-wide priorities that unify the executive team as opposed to individual functional goals being a critical success factor. • Flexible work options to attract and retain talent These strategies are likely here to stay, with an impressive 70 percent of workers strongly believing that flexible working would make a job more attractive to them. Work-life balance is seen as a key benefit that workers are looking for from their employers. To achieve this, employers are adopting per diem staffing models supported by technology platforms, offering shortened and unconventional work shifts, hybrid work options and remote work as a permanent option. • Automation, data and analytics Streamlining processes goes a long way in promoting workforce talent working to the top of license and ability. These strategies allow companies to respond to new work environments and expectations with greater agility, reducing reliance on
employees where possible. • Career advancement and upskilling opportunities • Competitive compensation and improved benefits Too few workers available possessing required skill sets will necessitate greater financial investment in higher wages to successfully compete against other employers and offset inflation. Added benefits such as additional paid time off, enhanced mental health and well-being programs and childcare serve to attract workers who are increasingly looking for employer support around issues that matter most to them. • Rehiring (boomeranging) Many organizations have Human
Resource policies that hamper reacquiring talent. This valuable employee segment is experienced and already familiar with and oriented to the organization. Employees resign for a myriad of reasons and penalizing them with restrictive rehire policies may only hurt the organization when demand for talent is at a high. Rehiring can help contain costs associated with onboarding and training as well as enhance the bench strength of knowledgeable preceptors and leadership.
The business case for flexible work hours Getting outside the mental box of what a workday should look like has opened opportunities for employers to re-engage top talent that decided to walk away from their jobs during the pandemic. There are several persuasive benefits that leaders can cite to make the business case for adopting work models that afford greater flexibility: 1. On-demand labor models help organizations pivot quickly to address fluctuating census and acuity. Having a means of hiring professionals looking for flexible opportunities is a win-win and allows organizations to scale up and down as necessary thereby controlling fixed FTE and travel agency costs. 2. Flexibility enables employees to produce better results by allowing them to exert greater control over when and where they work. According to Stanford’s study The Impact of Flexible Working Hours on the Employee’s Performance, flexibility is linked to increased employee morale, job satisfaction, efficiency and overall business profitability. 3. Employee-centric models improve employee retention, backed up by studies that demonstrate a connection between flexible hours and employee engagement. 4. Flexible models attract a wider choice of talent by meeting
employable talent where they are. Top talent expects employers to meet their needs with flexible options. An untapped talent pool exists of workers who don’t want to be constrained by traditional shifts and work schedules.
Millennial workers in particular place importance on flexible work schedules. 5. Better mental and physical health is another benefit of flexible work models. Kenexa High Performance
Institute conducted a study that found 68 percent of people with inflexible schedules report
‘unreasonable’ levels of work stress with only 20 percent of those with flexible schedules reporting likewise. FlexJobs found in a survey of 3,000 respondents that 45 percent view flexible work as having a significant improvement on their overall quality of life and 52 percent believe it would have a positive impact. Nearly 80 percent said it would promote healthier behaviors with 86 percent reporting flexible work produces less stress.
Workforce expectations have evolved and will likely continue to do so as environmental, societal, economic and technological changes march on. A multi-prong approach to building and retaining an effective workforce is vital and agile strategies and an array of staffing partner offerings is essential to address the pressing demands health care leaders now face when staffing their organizations.
The Bold Path: Minority Women in Healthcare Navigating Executive Leadership November 17, 2021
By: Audrianne Schneider
During this November’s Fireside Chat, a panel of inspirational, insightful executive leaders offered a glimpse into their personal career journeys and sound advice to professionals at every level. Moderator Colea Owens, MBA, BSN, RN, Associate Dean of Nursing, West Coast University, began the discussion by asking the panelists to share pivotal moments in their careers. Panelists included Tiffany Northern, FACHE, COO, Texas Health Dallas, Suzanne Jackson, FACHE, Vice President of Urgent Care, HCA, Sandra Sneed, Vice President of Operations, Texas Health Arlington and Angela Vincent Michael, Manager, Improvement Academy, Performance Analytics & MCCN, Methodist Health System.
Panelists shared compelling and interesting stories of their career journeys. Some common themes included being open to new opportunities, facing challenges with optimism and being grounded in one’s personal mission. Tiffany Northern shared “If your path is difficult, it is because your purpose is bigger than you thought!”
Through their combined stories and shared experiences, panelists agreed that these four areas are important at any stage of one’s career: • Maintaining a positive attitude and challenging yourself. • Developing a personal mission statement. • Building relationships (and your network). • Being open to a variety of experiences. When asked about how they decided what they wanted in a career, Angela Vincent Michael stated that there is no magic formula and that it is important to stay grounded in one’s mission. “Always seek advice from a diverse panel, but trust your gut and always have a growth mindset – it’s the cornerstone of resilience,” she stated. Sandra Jackson advised not listening to those who say there is only one path. “There are so many options – find roles that align with your mission.”
The next question for the panel focused on pushing through uncomfortable moments. Tiffany said, “Be comfortable being uncomfortable.” Suzanne offered that “the table” can be any size and anywhere (not just a board room) – she challenged attendees to create environments of inclusion where people feel comfortable talking about difficult issues or situations. Angela advised learning how to articulate your voice wherever you are in your career.
The conversation concluded with goal-setting and the importance of networking. When talking about sponsors and mentors, Sandra noted that “A sponsor is someone who mentions your name when you’re not in the room”. Helping and supporting each other is key at every career stage.
Colea closed the session by thanking the panelists and announcing a donation in honor of their service to the ACHE North Texas Leadership Legacy Fund.
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