Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1233999
95 95 PRACTICE MANAGEMENT THOUGHT LEADERSHIP children for the future success of the city and the state. e other key partner, as we think about moving forward, is the pri- mary care pediatric community. We still believe the most important medical home for children is their primary care pediatrician. We want to continue to support that model in every way we can, in terms of bringing further opportunities to manage certain diseases and chal- lenges within the primary care setting. We'll be opening up a new site in Skokie in summer 2021, where we're positioning primary care pe- diatrics alongside our pediatric subspecialists, so we can optimize the coordination of care. Q: What frustrates you most about the healthcare indus- try right now? TS: It's really the ongoing, insufficient focus on childhood and adoles- cence in the healthcare sectors. We're starting to see the ramifications of that nationally. U.S. infant mortality statistics are not great when we compare ourselves across the globe, and even when we compare our- selves to our past, mortality rates for infants, children and adolescents are at best stagnant, or in fact, going up. e biggest hurdle we have currently is deaths from suicide, which is at a crisis level. People talk so much about managing chronic diseases in adulthood, and we know with the aging patient population how much further pressure on healthcare costs that's going to create. Why don't we pause, look at our kids and invest in healthy, educated children? at's the solution to the future. Because if they're healthy, then they go into adulthood with minimal healthcare costs and they'll have adopted healthy behaviors and will not have the origins of many of the chronic diseases. Healthy, educated kids become productive, tax-paying citizens that contribute to the economic strength of the city and the state. at's why I reflect back on Gov. Pritzker's and Mayor Lightfoot's thinking in terms of starting to tilt and pivot greater investment into the kids, because that is the future. Until we start thinking in that way, we're going to find ourselves not optimally developing the kind of financial sustainability and security as a state that Illinois citizens aspire to. n Stanford Children's COO: How leaders can drive negative emotions out of the workplace By Rick Majzun, Vice President and COO, Stanford Children's Health A s senior leaders in complex healthcare organiza- tions, we have an enormous privilege. Each day, we support thousands of wonderful people doing amazing work taking care of patients and their families. We set the pace for change. We speed it up, and when appro- priate, we slow it down. We are equally charged with man- aging things simple and complex. We have a small number of key responsibilities: achieving our missions, making our margins and taking care of our people. However, we some- times forget that the last point — taking care of our people — should always be the first point. We have to make sure our people feel safe, important and valued. And one of the best ways we take care of our peo- ple is by driving negative emotions out of the workforce. We do this by creating systems, processes and cultural ex- pectations that drive fear, guilt, shame and blame out of our organizations. Here are five ways to jumpstart this process: 1. Create the safest possible environment for your em- ployees and physicians Whenever I am in front of a group of our frontline staff, I remind them that our executive team at Stanford Children's Health reviews the previous day's safety event summaries every morning. I tell them my favorite is the "self-report." I truly appreciate when I read "I made a mistake, this is why, and here's how I will do things differently in the future." Sharing my learnings from these reports reminds our team that these safety events have the attention of our executive team. It demonstrates the importance we place on having a just culture, that we use our errors to get better, and that our employees can feel safe reporting underperformance. A team member who feels fully supported, psychologically safe and able to act in the best interest of the patient and their fellow care team members will make much better de- cisions than one who is afraid to speak up when she sees something unsafe in the organization. Our patients and their families carry so much fear and need so much com- fort. If our employees also carry fear, they will not be able to care and give comfort to the best of their abilities. Questions to consider: • How willing are your employees to use your safety reporting system to expose problems? • Even better, do they use it to provide solutions? • Do you use your safety reporting system to celebrate employees? 2. Create an environment that is free of guilt, blame and shame Guilt is an emotion that is rarely productive in the work- place. It often emerges when we meet the inevitable con- flict between work-life balance. When you leave work early to attend a child's soccer game, and you make sure your team knows that, you give them permission to do the same thing without being burdened by guilt. Talking openly about personal commitments will encourage your team to balance their own family obligations. Having more con- trol over one's time means having more control over one's stress level. Questions to consider: • Are your work life balance habits healthy? Are you a role model in this area? • How comfortable does your team feel balancing their personal and professional commitments? Are they using all of their paid time off? Each of us has a collection of successes and failures that comprise our leadership journey. Similar to the safety