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I think we are in the patient care business, so we have to prioritize patient care first. And I think we have to continue to attract employees who also understand that we are in the business of providing care, sometimes we provide it really efficiently and sometimes we don’t. But we have to make sure we’re providing good quality care.
I do think it’s trickier than ever because some units are short, some nurses or other teammates are working double shifts or have worked a lot so they’re tired. I think this is where some of those qualities that we talked about earlier come into play, having empathy so you understand what’s going on with your team who are there to deliver care, so that you can meet and understand what some of their issues are, so that they can deliver great care.
I think also understanding what are some of the innovative or technology oriented things that we can do to be a little bit more efficient. We obviously aren’t going to change dramatically our delivery system. Ever since I’ve been in health care, we’ve talked about changing our delivery system, and we need to do that.
But for a leader today, when many of our workforces are in crisis or short staffed, we have to think in what are we going to do this shift to make sure that we’re all aligned on providing quality patient care, how are we going to collaborate, how are we going to help each other, how are we going to understand what needs to happen in this 10 hour shift, this eight hour shift so that we can get through it and deliver the high quality care that we need to do.
I think the other understanding that we have to have is our workforce, really is, and you’ve probably all heard this before. There’s at least four generations in our workforce, some very experienced people and some less experienced people. And so understanding the uniquenesses of the people that are in our workforces, I think it’s important to pair up the diversities of our workforces because I think that diversity, regardless of whether it’s age, or experience, or background, or race, that just makes us a better, stronger team.
And so that is again where leadership empathy, leadership agility, and courage to make those just in time decisions so that we are serving our patients in a high quality manner, safe manner so that we are delivering efficient and effective patient care. But it’s not easy, everything I just said is hard and it does require us to be present on the units in those moments in order to get it done.
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