How do you get a large healthcare organization to improve employee’s willingness to speak up and dramatically improve patient safety?

Hi, I’m Patrice Putman, director of employee development here at MaineGeneral Health.
MaineGeneral Health has 3,500 employees; we’re the third largest healthcare provider in Maine.

Describe the employee pains you were trying to resolve.

We did a system-wide survey back in 2003 and it found that 20 percent of our employees felt that we did not deal with conflict well within in the organization.

We knew how important it is for a healthcare organization to deal with conflict well both for employee satisfaction and for patient satisfaction. So, the executive group decided to approach this very aggressively and charged my department with trying to find a solution to their concerns around conflict.

Why did you choose Crucial Conversations Training?

I started researching a variety of different approaches to the issue of conflict and I read about Crucial Conversations in a nursing magazine. I bought the book, read it, and liked it. I happened to attend a conference where one of the authors was speaking and liked what he had to say. We also had somebody from VitalSmarts come to MaineGeneral and present the approach to all of our managers—about 200 managers—and they loved it.

From there it was easy. The senior management all volunteered to be trained themselves as a starting point. A dozen of us were trained as trainers and we’ve been training ever since.
We train at least monthly. We have a waiting list for our training. It’s all volunteer. We train about 20 people a month and we’ve trained about 1,000 people in the last few years. People love it…people love it.

What business results have you experienced as a result of the training?

The results are the most exciting thing about what we’ve done. Not only have we continued to improve employee satisfaction, we’ve improved dramatically our ability to deal with conflict and our ability to communicate throughout the organization. So that was our original goal.

In addition to that, we’ve had some wonderful results around patient safety. When we first started, only 10 percent of our staff would speak up when they saw a mistake, disrespect, lack of initiative, or poor teamwork.

With the work that we’ve done, the people that we’ve trained have moved from 10 percent willingness to speak up to 50 percent willingness to speak up—which is a huge difference.

And not only that, but over the last year, we’ve seen a cultural shift happen. Even if they’ve not been trained, now 37 percent of our staff speak up when they see a mistake. That translates into dramatic patient safety results and that’s the thing I’m most excited about—we’ve dealt with the conflict and our patient’s are safer now. The quality of care is better and that is why we’re in business here.