Nurses from the Hawaii region recently visited Southern California in a knowledge exchange with unit-based team leaders and consultants in San Diego.

Seven members of the Hawaii team of managers and union members arrived October 11 and shadowed their colleagues in the San Diego service area for three days. For the Hawaii team, which is entering its second active year in the Labor Management Partnership, the trip was an effort to learn successful practices firsthand, develop mentoring relationships and get tips on getting teams up and running.

Members of the Hawaii Nurses Association, Local 50 of OPEIU and the sole labor partner in the Hawaii region LMP, saw no reason to reinvent the proverbial wheel and initially turned to their labor peers in California.

 Lessons from leaders

“We are happy to take what we’ve learned along the way and share it with you,” Marianne Giordano, president of OPEIU Local 30 and labor co-chair of San Diego LMP Council, told the Hawaii group.

The San Diego team shared everything from their service-area LMP governing structure to day-to-day operations, such as partnership training, team communications, budgeting, time management and prioritizing resources.

Ray Hahn, assistant medical center administrator in San Diego, told the group that support from regional leaders is essential.  “We track [the UBTs’] progress so we can step in and help them. And we can make these decisions because of the support structure we have in place.”

Hahn and Giordano lead the UBT implementation team, which includes facilitators, consultants and trainers.

UBT tips and tools

The San Diego exchange included a demonstration of UBT tools and resources often used in Southern California, such as UBT Tracker. The Hawaii group also learned about San Diego’s facilitator pool —employees trained to support new UBTs through their beginning stages —and the content experts’ directory, which includes regional staff who can help teams with attendance, workplace safety and other programs.

In one session, UBT consultant Sue Smith explained how she offers new teams just-in-time training so they can learn by doing. “We deliver the training when the team is ready to do that test,” she told the Hawaii group . “For example, a team is trained on CDM [consensus decision-making] right before they write the team charter, then 15 minutes later they are actually using CDM to give the thumbs-up to their charter.”

A learning journey

Linda Puu, interim chief nursing officer for Moanalua Medical Center and a member of the Hawaii LMP Council, found it as valuable to learn what not to do, as what to emulate.

“We can learn from their mistakes,” said Puu, who was intrigued by San Diego’s engagement in the Southern California regional goals. “They can tell us what not to do…and if we have anything they don’t have, we can share with them.”

“I think it’s the best thing we done since we’ve been in the partnership,” Jane A. Hamel, an improvement advisor and HNA member, said of the exchange. “They were so completely generous in opening to us. I think this has saved us countless hours of trial and error.”