My Personal Business Commitments are tied to quality improvement

My Personal Business Commitments are tied to quality improvement

Public blog to staff and physicians / By Rik Ganderton, President and CEO, RVHS

Focus matters.

All of the improvements we have made for patients at Rouge Valley Health System in recent years are driven by our focus on achieving specific goals. It is our standard work to set annual personal business commitments (PBCs) to define that focus.

My 2011/12 personal business commitments show how we will achieve our Quality ImprovementPlan (QIP) and our three-year Strategic Plan-On-A-Page.

My PBCs set out the direction for all other team members, vice-presidents, directors and everyone throughout the hospital. Think of the PBCs as our high-level work plan for this fiscal year and a set of steps toward achieving our longer-term strategic plan.

Connecting our PBCs to the QIP also aligns us with key provincial government legislation. The QIP stems directly from the province’s Excellent Care for All Act. So the QIP offers a roadmap to implementing improvements to our patients’ experience.

At Rouge Valley, we have committed to an ambitious set of goals to improve the patient experience. These are aligned with our Strategic Plan-On-A-Page and the four strategic dimensions embedded in it: 

1. Access to Care;
2. Service Excellence;
3. Team Engagement; and
4. Fiscal Responsibility.

Please read the MS Excel spreadsheet of the RVHS Executive 2011–12 Personal Business Commitments for me and the entire senior management team. You’ll see how each dimension leads to a set of measurements that we will deliver and track our achievements against. (View the members of senior management team and the roles that they play at our hospital.) 

Each commitment is connected to weightings – the relative importance of each item – so the items with the greatest weighting will receive our greatest focus. To view my goals and weightings just click on my tab in the document.

You’ll see that we are all committed to measuring our performance against four heavily weighted metrics: the hospital standardized mortality ratio; achieving a top notch emergency department patient length of stay for our admitted patients; meeting our financial targets of generating a surplus so that we can reinvest in infrastructure and equipment; and staff satisfaction, to support our team of employees and physicians in improving patient care.

The PBCs hold me, and us, accountable to:

• Delivering high quality health care;
• Creating a positive patient experience;
• Ensuring that we are responsive and accountable to the public; and
• Being transparent about it.

These PBCs start the chain of accountability to move us further along on our journey of operational and cultural transformation, which we started in 2007-2008.  

We continue to use Lean as our management philosophy and framework for continuous improvement. It is the philosophy and tool kit that enable us to implement the PBCs. It is our expectation that every department and program use our many Lean tools or techniques. These tools and techniques include value stream analysis, process mapping,  Kaizen events, standard work, reorganizing the work environment (6S), A3 problem-solving, process control boards, Kamishibai (visual management auditing mechanisms) and more.

In my next blog I will talk about how we are bringing a consistent strategic alignment throughout the organization and one of the specific techniques we are using to do this – the Gemba walk.