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Spread Change
Teams are spreading change every day
I had the pleasure and privilege of sitting in on an LMP Council meeting at West Los Angeles Medical Center last Friday. There are hundreds of other such meetings going on throughout the system all the time.
This meeting brought together the top executives of the medical group and the administration of the hospital, as well as top managers of the outpatient settings in the service area. Unions were represented by experienced stewards and workplace leaders from across all important job classifications. Let us all commend the commitment of time, energy, and collaboration by all involved.
And what are they working on?
The group recognizes that great work has been done over the last two years to launch unit-based teams. Some are very successful, some are struggling. They recognize that the teams need direct support from sponsors, including the LMP Council itself. The meeting on Friday focused entirely on how this leadership group will make regular rounds of the facilities: to address roadblocks and barriers; to enhance communication; and to align UBT, medical center, and regional goals.
This is what we mean by “spread change.”
We’re doing it every day
Our work in Partnership is evolving everyday toward a fully integrated strategic collaboration. At the heart of this collaboration is the recognition that team development is essential for transformational change and sustaining great outcomes in clinical quality, patient safety, service, affordability, and continuing to make Kaiser Permanente the best place to work in the industry.
The LMP Council at West Los Angeles made new commitments to one another to oversee the evaluation of team development on the 1-5 scale as outlined by the national OLMP. The Council has set aggressive goals of having a majority of teams be at a level 3 as soon as possible. (Level 3 defines teams that have learned to successfully use the PDSA cycle and are transitioning working on operational issues.)
Team development, including both LMP and performance improvement education, communication, huddles, rounding, enhancing business literacy, all sponsored by leaders from the unions, the medical groups and management will create the sustainable learning environment we seek. A learning environment creates innovation on a continuing basis and eliminates fear of top-down driven initiatives and projects. Teams develop the collaborative capacity to improve all aspects of care and working conditions to promote the best outcomes for the patients.
Change is spreading. We can see it, we can feel it! We are beginning to consistently use the same language of transformation within the organization.
Watch for this theme “Spreading Change” over the coming weeks. Our annual Coalition Delegate Conference is less than a month away. Over 700 union leaders will come together for a three-day learning and sharing experience…and you guessed it, the theme is SPREAD CHANGE!
Let us know how you spread change every day.
Re: Spread Change
Thanks, John, for coming to West LA to see what we do at the facility level. It took a great deal of effort for us to get all of our Unit Based Teams up and running (68 in all). I don’t think anyone ever could have imagined how resource intensive the launch of the UBTs would be for our medical center. The West LA LMP Council and Strategy Group are very proud of our UBTs that achieved great success in 2009. For example, 5A’s help in developing and piloting the KP MedRite Nursing Sash program which gained national attention, as well as our EVS team, which helped to the reduce injury rate by 61% in Q4, 2009 compared to Q3, 2009. With these and other success stories, we were supercharged during our “What’s Next” meeting that you joined us in.
The LMP Strategy Group Rounds will hopefully put a face to our team as well as show every employee that LMP is the way the West LA does business. Along with the monthly reports we want to meet face-to-face with the frontline. We hope to find out what’s working and what’s not working, and how we can facilitate the teams in meeting their goals. From our rounds we will be able to identify barriers for UBTs such as, “Do you need help with understanding RIM,” “Would you benefit from our new brown bag lunch “how to” sessions” or “Are labor and management stuck and could use a facilitator from outside of the department to break down barriers?” Our Sponsors and Executive Sponsors want to do what we can to help our teams so that we can reach our regional goal of each team being a level 3 or higher by year’s end. We look forward to your next visit when we can share our progress with you again, as we continue to “Spread Change.”
Great work
Dear Vanessa,
I am going to Spread Change, by spreading your ideas to others around the program. Thank you for your energy, creativity, and leadership.
-John