Respect: The foundation for quality care

by Gary S. Kaplan At Virginia Mason Medical Center, we understand respect must be shown every day, at all levels of our organization, for us to provide the best care and a perfect patient experience. If our physicians, nurses and other team members don't feel valued and respected, this will affect their ability to put the patient first in everything we do. Lucian L. Leape, M.D., a founder of the National Patient Safety Foundation, has observed that disrespect among hospital employees is "a threat to patient safety because it inhibits collegiality and cooperation essential to teamwork, cuts off communication, undermines morale, and inhibits compliance with and implementation of new practices." We launched Virginia Mason's Respect for People initiative in 2012, recognizing it is applicable to our strategic priorities (people, quality, service and innovation). Because respect for people is essential to our success as a health system, we also have established it as an organizational goal. To kick things off, we asked our 5,500 team members to help us better understand what respect looks like. We assembled an advisory group with representatives across our organization that defined the top 10 foundational behaviors of respect. We developed a training program to ensure everyone has a shared understanding of why respect is so important and how it can be consistently demonstrated in the workplace. The training included a theatrical production in which we engaged actors to sta...
Source: hospital impact - Category: Health Managers Authors: Source Type: blogs