Coping with an onslaught of change

TUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 2011 :: By Anjetta McQueen

Tips for dealing with change

Learn what other teams--and the people who train and support them--do to deal with change.

• Subject to change without notice [Story]

Sometimes change just brings more change.

In January of this year, the Mid-Atlantic States region opened the Capitol Hill center, a four-level, 170,000-square-foot facility, relocating 100 physicians and more than 400 clinical and administrative staff. Two longstanding facilities merged in the process, and one of those then closed.

The center offers medical services that previously weren’t available, such as peritoneal dialysis and transfusion services, and it changed some services such as laboratory, pharmacy and urgent care to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, creating shift—and lifestyle—changes for staff.

To assist with the move, the region’s transition team, with management and labor partners, prepared a comprehensive plan for hundreds of staff members as well as KP members and patients. The team spent six months addressing issues ranging from staffing levels to parking and orientation.

For members of unit-based teams, the new facility caused a wave of changes:

• leaving a clinic they had worked at for 20 years,
• facing, in some cases, a new one- or two-hour commute to the new clinic, and
• reapplying for jobs they had held for years.

Labor partners were instrumental in helping provide coaching, résumé writing, interviewing and technology skills, says Pati Nicholson, the region’s union co-lead. The transition team will perform a post-occupancy evaluation to assess lessons learned and ferret out best practices, information that will help them in planning for the opening of new centers, such as the Gaithersburg Medical Center in 2012.

“I don’t think they could have done this without engaging the frontline,” Nicholson says.