As leaders, we want to foster work environments that create safe and reliable care for patients and employees. Sounds easy, but its hard work! Chief Human Resources Officer Sarah Sherer coaches leaders from around the system on thinking through when it’s time to look at a process and when it’s time for coaching an employee.
Hospitalist Ryan Murphy reflects on the care his dad received as one of Utah’s first hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The experience shaped how he communicates with patients—whether or not they have COVID—in spite of isolation, masks, and physical distancing.
Our moment calls for new ways of leading. Kyle Turner and Michelle Vo, relational leadership trainers, explain how this concept brings us to the task. While traditional leadership theories focus on the what and how, relational leadership asks us to place more emphasis on who.
With thoughtful consideration of lessons learned from more than 20 years of nursing, nurse manager Shegi Thomas works to make life better for patients and staff. Along with opening our internal medicine unit 4 years ago, Shegi brings perspective from rehab, newborn intensive care, and from organizations like the WHO, to sum up a few leadership principles applicable to any team.
Alison Flynn Gaffney defines herself as a servant leader. As U of U Health’s Executive Director of Service Lines, Ancillary and Support Services, she brings more than two decades of experience in strategic, operations, and consulting roles at academic medical centers and community hospitals. Here are Alison’s expert tips for effective servant leadership.
The pace of technological progress can make it seem like solutions to our health care problems are only a click away. Howard Weeks, Utah’s interim chief medical information officer, lauds the virtues of technology with this caveat: you can’t IT your way out of every problem.
For years, nurse manager Emily Baarz has mentored millennial nurses joining Neuro Critical Care (NCC). But new nurse graduates weren’t always prepared for the high-acuity setting. So Emily created the Axon/Dendrite program, a mentor-leader model to support her staff’s professional growth.
In the new series Book Club for Busy People, Accelerate shares highlights of books we’re hearing about from the community. First up: how thinking about others’ needs strengthens teams and increases civility in The Outward Mindset.
Drawing from psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s Elephant and the Rider metaphor, Utah's Chief Medical Quality Officer Bob Pendleton explains why emotions are critical to motivating change in health care. Behavioral economics, it appears, may provide the direction we need.
Rounding–the act of connecting with patients and staff–is a leadership best practice. While few find rounding easy to start, those who master it are hooked. It is a daily habit that improves patient care, experience and engages the team. Susan Clark and her medical director, Dr. Dana DeWitt, have taken the practice one step further by rounding together as a leadership dyad, resulting in a more connected and authentic team.
We begin every Accelerate interview by asking about a person’s intrinsic motivation to work in health care, lead a team, or make a change. In other words, we always start with “why.”
What if a patient described their care team as “incredibly competent, experienced and collaborative”*? Those are the adjectives used by a patient to describe their surgery at South Jordan Health Center. As the nurse manager of South Jordan’s surgical services, Brent Klev works to ensure that every patient has that experience. Here, Klev shares three ways he fosters a culture of teamwork through shared purpose.
