Fostering Ongoing Culture Change
Sustaining engagement strategies and maximizing their benefits to both patients and the health care organization involves a shift in organizational culture. Fostering culture change requires consistent attention from leadership and active outreach to staff to stress the importance of engagement at all levels of the organization.
Strategies to promote culture change include:
- Leadership demonstration of the importance of patient engagement by incorporating the patient voice into strategy discussions and ensuring it is reflected in the organizational mission and vision.
- Include the value of engagement and the skill sets required for effective engagement in department budgets, measures of success, and employee job descriptions. Reinforce engagement as a part of staff supervision and annual evaluations by creating individual engagement goals and providing staff development opportunities.
- Share data and concrete examples with leadership and departmental staff, (even if this initial data and concrete examples come from other organizations,) that demonstrates the impact engagement can have on quality of care, patient satisfaction, and cost.
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Provide opportunities for staff to develop collaborative working relationships with patients so they see firsthand how engagement can positively influence their work. Find small ways in which to reinforce the importance of the patient/family role, such as by providing the advisors with badges, ensuring they have input into meeting agendas, and ensuring they have adequate time to voice their ideas during meetings.
Note from the Field
Children’s Mercy Kansas City stresses the importance of patient engagement starting at the leadership level. Existing leaders have opportunities to engage with PFAs and Program Managers routinely in department and executive meetings to observe the benefits of engagement first-hand. New leaders, prior to being hired, are interviewed by PFAs to understand their engagement philosophy and to inform the hiring selection.
- Ask patients and family members involved in engagement strategies to present to staff during meetings and provide feedback on major decisions such as investments in facility improvements, changes to policies, and senior level staffing searches.
- Spotlight engagement success by inviting patients and staff with positive experiences engaging on a quality improvement project to discuss the impacts and share lessons learned.
Self-Assessment Questions
On a scale of 1 to 5 (with 1 indicating “strongly disagree” and 5 indicating “strongly agree”), rate your organization’s performance on the following questions:
- The leadership at my organization regularly highlight the successes of our engagement efforts and the patients and staff leading the efforts.
- My organization dedicates the staffing and financial resources needed to effectively operate our outreach strategy.
- Service lines/departments/sites within my organization collaborate and share lessons learned as a result of our engagement efforts.
- In my organization, staff view patient advisors as equal partners and seek out their guidance to help them identify and fix problems.
- Patient advisors are included in important organization meetings and are regularly invited to present to leadership and staff.
Resources
- General Culture Change Materials
- Patient Engagement Specific Materials
