Caring enough to keep getting better

By Tracey Dobson, President & CEO, Mountain Valley

One of the things I appreciate most about the people who work at Mountain Valley is that they are never satisfied simply because something is working well today. There is always a willingness to ask: Could we do this better? In healthcare, I think that is an important question to keep asking.

We have a responsibility to provide the best possible experience for every patient and family we serve. To do that, we have to be willing to listen, learn, look carefully at our results and sometimes change the way we do things.

That means paying attention to patient and family satisfaction surveys. It means looking at patient outcomes and other measures of quality. But it also means listening to our team members—the people who are providing care every day and often see opportunities for improvement before anyone else does.

I love the way Shannon Jacobson, our Director of Patient Services, talks about this in the video above. She describes something I see throughout Mountain Valley: when we identify an opportunity to improve, our response isn’t simply to acknowledge it. We bring people together and ask what we can do about it.

What is working? What isn’t? Is there a program we could develop? Is there a different way to structure a team? Could changing a schedule help our nurses provide better care? Is there a position or resource we could add that would improve the experience of patients and families? Those questions matter because sometimes the hardest thing for an organization to say is, “This isn’t working.”

There can be a natural tendency to keep doing things a certain way because that’s how they’ve always been done. But I don’t believe our patients and families are well served by our becoming too attached to a particular process or way of doing things. If something isn’t working as well as it should, we need to be willing to acknowledge that, learn from it and try something different.

I also believe that requires a certain kind of culture. Team members need to feel comfortable raising their hands and saying, “I think there might be a better way.” They need to know their ideas will be heard and that identifying a problem isn’t the same thing as complaining. In fact, sometimes pointing out what isn’t working is one of the most caring things a person can do.

That is why listening is such an important part of continuous improvement. Surveys and quality measures give us valuable information, but so do the experiences of the nurses, physicians, nursing assistants, social workers, chaplains and others who spend their days caring for patients and families. We need both.

And improvement doesn’t always have to mean a major new initiative. Sometimes it is a relatively small change in a process, schedule or team structure. What matters is being willing to keep looking, keep listening and keep asking whether there is something we could do better.

I am proud that Shannon sees that commitment in Mountain Valley. I’m even more proud that she and so many of her colleagues are part of making it happen. Our commitment to improving the patient and family experience isn’t a project with a beginning and an end. It’s part of how we care. Because when patients and families trust us to walk alongside them during such an important time in their lives, I don’t think we should ever stop asking how we can serve them better.