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The Wisdom of Leaders: How to Cultivate Teams

Leaders embody U of U Health’s focus on patient-centered care, respect for people, and continued improvement. Recently, Jessica Rivera, Carissa Christensen, Sue Childress, and Tracy Farley described their efforts to deliver a better health care experience for patients by taking care of their teams. In advance of individual articles from each leader, below are four big takeaways that can be put into action today.

Improving Wellness: 40 Champions, 20 Projects, 12 Months of Progress

A year ago, University of Utah Health decided to tackle a major problem in health care today: burnout. Forty people – and their teams – spread across an enormous health system took on the challenge. We sat down with family physician and co-director of the Resiliency Center Amy Locke to learn about what works in improving faculty and staff wellness.

How Technology and Teamwork Improve Patient Experience

Managing patients’ expectations is often a euphemism for pragmatically preventing disappointment. But Melissa Briley, physician assistant at Redstone Health Center, integrates technology, teamwork, and clinic flow processes to reduce the uncertainty that comes from waiting for test results or instructions from a provider.

Lean Behind the Scenes: Sterile Processing

Sterile Processing runs a lean operation, delivering millions of instruments to University of Utah Health’s procedural teams. Director of value engineering Steve Johnson, assisted by the video wizardry of Charlie Ehlert, sheds light on our system’s unseen infection prevention heroes.

How to Focus on the Essentials (And Eliminate Everything Else)

Best-selling author, teacher, and speaker Greg McKeown published Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less three years ago, but the book still resonates powerfully today. In the spirit of sharing ideas worth spreading, Accelerate managing editor Nick McGregor digs in to Essentialism’s “Less is better” ethos.

Teams That Learn Together, Stay Together: Book Club Basics

University of Utah’s Support Services makes learning a part of their routine. Director Dustin Banks considers his book club the most important meeting he attends. Why? Because it brings together Support Services’ diverse leadership group — customer service, hospital operators, environmental services, volunteers, interpreters and security — to learn and grow as a team.

Ari Weinzweig on the Power of Belief

Ari Weinzweig, CEO and cofounder of Zingerman’s gourmet food company, spoke at U of U Heath’s Leadership Development Institute (LDI) this past March. Weinzweig argues the power of belief – and our individual ability and freedom change our beliefs – is the answer to unlocking our personal and organizational potential.

Canyoneering Close Call: Always Have a Safety Plan

Engineer Cindy Spangler compares canyoneering and surgery and identifies a common thread: the need for high-reliability processes. She describes how surgical time-out, a quick huddle to debrief before surgery, can serve as a useful model for reducing the risk of harm in canyoneering.

What I'm Reading: 3 Tips For Changing Culture

As Utah’s first graduate medical director of quality and safety, hospitalist Ryan Murphy has a big job: prepare physicians to transform health care. Like any good student, Murphy hit the books to understand how to lead this tall order. Here he shares three insights from one of his favorite leadership books.

Want To Transform Health Care? Work on a "Boring" Project

Claire Ciarkowski is on a journey to reduce unnecessary labs for inpatients at University of Utah Health. As a junior faculty member, she volunteered to work on the project when it didn’t sound exciting. But she is changing culture by asking the hard questions and delivering better care to patients at a lower cost. Accelerate’s Mari Ransco asked what she has learned.

How Nurse-Physician Rounding = High-Performing Teams

Teaching the next generation of health care providers happens every morning in 10 minute chunks throughout the hospital. The Surgical Intensive Care Unit reimagined the physician rounds to feature the patient’s nurse, instead of the patient’s physician-student. They found that this simple change created a stronger interprofessional team and advanced nursing practice.

Wanted: “Teams” not “Cowboys"

Dr. Kyle Bradford Jones confronts a long-held cultural icon in medicine: the cowboy doctor. He argues that living up to the cowboy mythology undermines how physicians provide care – in trying to do it all, they actually do more harm. His cure for cowboy medicine? Relying on a great team.