AHA Quality Series – Part Two

In my last post, I introduced the six quality aims as set out by the Institute of Medicine and supported by the AHA. Today I’d like to chat about talent management’s impact on the first aim, patient safety.

Patient Safety – Care must take place in a safe environment or the chances of a good patient outcome are significantly reduced.

The American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration (ASHHRA) convened a Thought Leader Forum, “The Role of Health Care Human Resources in Quality and Patient Safety“, on July 24, 2008. The forum stated that the biggest challenge to safety is constant change. Healthcare facilities must keep up with nationally directed core measures while simultaneously changing work processes (to meet core measure goals) and training employees on ways to successfully meet them.

HR can help employees cope with the changes by providing training and insight into how measurements will be applied and reported. The ASHHRA forum concluded that HR should use multiple communication methods (ranging from a traditional newsletter to a podcast) when communicating with employees in order reach every generation of worker.

While this is a solid recommendation, HR can go further. These criteria could and should be captured and communicated to employees as part of the employee performance management process, even included on their employee evaluation forms. Where training is required, this too should be captured and tracked as part of the performance management process. Employee performance management really should be an ongoing process, facilitating dialogue and feedback on performance and standards between managers and employees, not just an “after the fact” evaluation session.

Soon Generation Y is going to outnumber the baby boomers in the healthcare workforce, which makes the need for an ongoing feedback process even more critical. This is a generation that demands constant feedback on their performance, clear career paths, ongoing development opportunities, and rewards for their contributions. Consequently, managing this process using a paper-based manual system quickly becomes untenable. Web-based talent management systems have the power to pull these information requirements together. The end result is that employees can constantly keep track of the requirements of their role and their level of performance, get regular feedback from their managers and others, chart their career path, satisfy any training requirements, and stay on top of changes to their role or work that impact patient safety.

The forum highlighted other short term patient safety awareness tools such as “Patient Safety Week Events”, “Recognition Programs”, and “Quality Month”. These tools work for short term awareness, but become much more powerful when backed up by comprehensive strategy which includes employee development policies, competency assessments, goal management, and constant employee feedback.

What methods have you found effective for communicating changes in roles/procedures to each generation of employee? Do you see your performance management process as one of your key communication tools?