Friday, November 4, 2011

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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mr. Rik Ganderton,
I Read you document posted here titled RVHS EXecutive 2011-12 Personal Bussiness Committments. I was disappointed that no where did I see any data containing a committment to improving serive by reducing the wait time from the date of referal to the initial date of assessment by staff/Docters, of clients refered to the Mental Health Outpatient Department. Do we not count? How long should a person who may or may not be suffering from a serious mental illness wait to find help? What is a reasonabable wait time? Do you have any baseline data to compaire your facility's wait times to say a provincial or national average? How can you check if your facility is making any improvements in this area of your facility's service? If Prevention is factored into Today's Health Care as an important avenue to improving overall service, then lets hope that your facility is able to get the desperately needed care to those who trully suffer from some form of serious mental illness. One would think, it would be important to ensure a timely inital assessment of clients, refferrd to the Outpatient mental health department, and that a decrease in wait times for this initial contact/ assessment would become a committment by RVHS executives as a health service indicator that is worthy of some form of meaning-full measurement indicators, which appear absent from your statistics displayed in the above mentioned report. Thankyou.
From A current client of the RVHS mental health outpatient services.

Rouge Valley Health System said...

Decreasing wait times is a goal of ours in every part of the hospital, including mental health. The indicators and blog do not discuss everything, as that would be quite a long list. Thank you for reading our blog and sending us your view. For more information or questions please contact us via communityrelations@rougevalley.ca . - RVHS

Anonymous said...

Mr. Ganderton

Why is that RVHS has so many Directors,Managers,supervisors?

Is there a need to be so top heavy on management? When some are so inaffective on their role.

Anonymous

Anonymous said...

Mr. Ganderton,

You mentioned on your message about improvements and using available tools to enhance our delivery of service to our patients and our community.
However why is that we still have employees who do not understand that they are working in a health care facility and should therefore be profesionals and caring while delivering these services.
It seems to me that management is also responsible for their employees behaviour.

As it is the corporate favorite phrase"GOING FORWARD",our "SENIOR MANAGEMENT TEAM" are and should be more vigilante on the performance and the acting role of their managers.

It would be nice if you could answer this message.

Rouge Valley Health System said...

Thanks for your comments. In fact, our management team is a lean one.
Our managers work closely with their teams to ensure the best daily patient care. We welcome concerns and criticism to help us improve. Please contact our patient relations office to discuss specific patient experiences at our hospital.
Contact information is at www.rougevalley.ca/patient-relations
- RVHS