Java with Justin: Strategy Week 2024

This week we're marking Strategy Week, an important time to look ahead at all of the exciting and important initiatives that are underway as we head into Fiscal year 2024. Throughout FY 23 and into this current fiscal year, we continue to see our Medical Center answering the call of so many across our community who rely on us for their health needs. Unfortunately, this also results in extremely high capacity and other challenges - sometimes even hitting Capacity Level 5.?

These challenges only further solidify the importance of Strategy Week as we examine the ways we, as a collective Medical Center community of caregivers, can work together to overcome challenges and continue delivering the highest quality care with a focus on quality and safety, caregiver engagement, patient and family-centered care, operational excellence, finances and our academic mission.

Some of these goals are created from your direct influence by leveraging all of your responses in last year's caregiver engagement survey. Others are part of long-range efforts to position the Medical Center for success. Below you'll see our 2024 Strategy House.?

We start with the roof of our Strategy House – centering all we do to deliver Zero Harm and World-Class Quality. Our True North is Our Patient Care Vision. A strong foundation is needed to support this work - with Leadership, Culture and Innovation as the underpinnings of the rest of the house. ? New for FY24, inclusion and belonging are called out as a key priority – this reinforces our commitment to creating an environment where all caregivers feel they are an integral part of the Medical Center.?

Below, we'll dive into some of the ways we're working toward these strategies.?

We continue to work to make improvements to our quality and safety?efforts. As you can see, we're making strides in multiple areas including inpatient mortality, down 2.5% from October 2022-August 2023, and our patient harm events also show promising trends year over year, from Fiscal Year 2021.?

Here are some ways we will continue on this positive trajectory forward.

• Last fiscal year, our institutional SAFER teams continued their work to reduce patient and caregiver harm. We also formed two SAFER SWAT teams (pediatric behavioral health and Equipment teams). These teams were formed in response to items that came up from the caregiver survey and directly address topics that we have heard from caregivers about. We're so excited to be able to share soon the results and ways in which our SAFER SWAT teams have been able to act on your concerns.
• Our Daily Safety and Access Briefing allows us to collaboratively review operational successes, areas of opportunity and challenges and safety events that require action. For the past year, we've been sending out Manager Take-Back Messages to leaders so they can quickly and easily cascade important safety and operational information to frontline caregivers.?
• We continue to work on making the Medical Center a safe place to work for our caregivers with important tools like our Patient and Visitor Code of Conduct, AVADE Levels 1 and 2 training, patient watches and more. Caregiver safety is our top priority, so if you have ideas on how to make our work environment safer, please feel free to reach out to me.

Renamed for FY24, Operational Excellence adjusts our focus to ensure all caregivers can see, deliver, and improve the flow of care to a patient – while doing the right thing, the right way, every time and flow?continue to be areas of focus for our teams as we continuously hit Level 5 Capacity statuses and seek new and innovative ways to make sure our patients have access to the critical care they need. One way of achieving this, of course, is to create more space. Recently, the final beam was hoisted onto the North Pavilion Inpatient Building, capping a major milestone on this project. The PAV will add 72 beds in a cutting-edge space that will be healing for our patients and pleasant for our visitors. We are still on schedule to open in early 2025. At the same time, 19 new beds will come online on West 4 at Memorial. ?We also continue to optimize the space we do have and improving current flow in the inpatient and ED settings.?

When it comes to?Caregiver Engagement, we are continuously working on ways to make the Medical Center the best place to work. Our talent acquisition team continues to work on bringing in top talent - making it easier than ever to apply, interview and accept roles.? New this year, we’ve added Caregiver Wellness to this area, with a focus on ensuring caregivers have access to the resources they need to be healthy. We also know you want ways to have fun and connect with your fellow caregivers in other settings. That's why we once again held Family Fun Day for our Medical Center, Medical Group and Division 40 colleagues. Several weeks ago, more than 3,000 of you and your loved ones came to Polar Park to enjoy the food, games, live music, caricature artists, ball field and so much more. It was great to see you all having a good time! The video at this link is a quick snapshot of the excitement of the day.?

As it did last year, our Academic Missions goal is focused on our partnership with UMass Chan Medical School and maintaining an environment of learning and research collaboration. Finally, to be successful in these goals, we need to ensure our short- and long-term financial stability. ? ?

I look forward to advancing our progress and success in partnership with each of you in FY24!?