Alabama has announced it will be the first state to charge overweight state workers who don't work on slimming down. Officials have given the state's 37,527 employees a year to start getting fit, or they'll pay $25 a month for insurance that otherwise is free. The State Employees' Insurance Board will apply the obesity charge to anyone with a body mass index of 35 or higher who is not making progress on losing weight.
Sometimes you have to get out of your comfort zone to be a better leader. Inviting a patient to speak at a board meeting and share how a medical error has affected his or her life can be an uncomfortable situation for board members and senior executives. But it can also have a lasting impact on how those leaders evaluate processes and look at quality data because those numbers now have a face.
Similarly, having a CEO mentor an ICU nurse manager may cause both of them some anxiety—at least initially. But that relationship can also provide the CEO a vantage point from which he can better appreciate the daily challenges his clinical staff encounters. For instance, the CEO may glean more information on patient flow or barriers to quality improvement from an ICU tour led by his mentee than he can gain through his own rounding efforts.
Mentoring programs offer senior leaders an opportunity to break down silos and foster a team atmosphere across the organization. And often these relationships benefit the mentor as much as the mentee. "It's a win for the participant just to have that opportunity in on-the-job training, and it is a fabulous opportunity for the senior people to see what it's like walking in the moccasins of the manager," says Betty Noyes, a former hospital CEO who is now the president of the consulting firm Noyes & Associates Ltd.
Before you pair up your CFO with an IT director, here are a few pointers to help your mentoring program succeed.
Choosing the right mentor. There isn't one right answer when it comes to matching mentors and mentees. For example, Trinity Health has a mentoring component to its leadership development programs, and its hospitals vary widely in how they pair people together, says D'Anne Carpenter, the 44-hospital system's executive director of organization learning and development. Some hospitals are more structured in their approach, she says, and ask the participants to submit names of people that they would like to be mentored by and the director of the program reviews the submissions and approaches the mentors first. In other facilities, the participants ask the person directly if he or she would like to be their mentor. Carpenter's advice is that mentors shouldn't be assigned. "It is essential to find people who want to be mentors and let it occur more naturally than making a forced assignment."
If you're taking a more structured approach, it's also helpful to ask the participants what they want to learn more about and who they respect. Likewise, ask the mentors what skills they have to offer and whether or not they really want to be a mentor. "Mentors really need to make the commitment to volunteer the time, and they need to be rewarded and recognized for that effort," says Noyes. You may also want to avoid partnering an employee with their direct boss. The mentee may not feel comfortable asking questions and their boss may revert to telling them what to do rather than listening.
Teaching mentors. Not all executives have the skills required to be a good mentor, so make sure you offer them some guidance. For instance, they'll need to learn how to ask curious questions rather than providing answers. You want to challenge the mentee and really make them think. This can be an adjustment for many administrators whose first impulse is often to solve the problem. Mentors are encouraged, however, to share their expertise in navigating the system, such as, "I've found that X works well, or in this culture Y is effective," says Carpenter.
Mentor toolkit. Nothing is worse than having a newly paired mentor and mentee staring at each other during their first meeting and both wondering, "Now what?" Noyes advises giving mentors a reference guide with some conversation drivers and scripted questions to ask. This can be an invaluable resource to the mentor—especially if they are having a really hectic day and haven't had time to focus on the meeting beforehand.
Skills reinforcement. As part of their leadership development programs, Trinity Health gives each participant a project to complete. It has to be strategically aligned, important to the organization, measurable, and something that the participants can control, so that they can finish it during the program. "We push them to get results," says Carpenter. "We want them to take a baseline measurement, make a change, and take a post measurement to prove that they made a difference—it can be negative. But how do you tell? We have a lot of trouble with that in healthcare," she says.
This type of project creates another opportunity for the mentor to engage the mentee from a higher organizational level than they are accustomed to. The relationships established can also last long after the program ends and help align your employees around the goals of the organization.
Do you have an innovative approach to engaging staff members, or building an organizationwide culture? I'd like to hear about it. Drop me a line at the below e-mail address.
Carrie Vaughan is leadership editor with HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at cvaughan@healthleadersmedia.com.
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California public health officials are investigating the possible tuberculosis exposure of nearly 1,000 babies from a Kaiser Permanente nurse, and meanwhile hundreds of worried parents have been flocking to the San Francisco hospital to begin screening tests. Kaiser disclosed that a night-shift healthcare worker in the maternity ward's postpartum unit had developed an active case of tuberculosis. The nurse was a Kaiser employee from March 10 to Aug. 10, and Kaiser learned of the infection Aug. 18. It then began notifying 960 mothers and 115 employees that they and their babies may have been exposed.
The American College of Emergency Physicians, an organization representing the nation's 26,000 emergency medicine doctors, fired back today at a John McCain campaign advisor who said, in effect, that as long as there are emergency rooms, no one in American is really uninsured. The advisor, John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, said that emergency rooms are a last resort for healthcare for anyone because, by law, emergency rooms can't turn away a patient in need of immediate care. Linda Lawrence, MD, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, said in response: "Emergency physicians can and do perform miracles every day, but taking on the full-time medical care for 46 million uninsured Americans is one miracle even we cannot perform. Access to care in the emergency department is no substitute for the comprehensive healthcare reform policy that should be at the heart of the platform of any presidential campaign."
A Los Angeles man who recruited homeless people from skid row as medical patients as part of a scheme to defraud government health programs of millions of dollars has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges. Estill Mitts, 64, agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion in a plea agreement. Mitts was arrested Aug. 6 along with Rudra Sabaratnam, MD, an owner of City of Angels Medical Center. They were arrested as federal officials raided three hospitals in Los Angeles and Orange counties and made public a 21-count indictment that accuses the pair of healthcare fraud and receiving illegal cutbacks.
Georgia health officials have announced a plan to preserve Medicaid and PeachCare for Kids for the next two years. About 1.4 million Georgians participate in Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor, and in PeachCare, the program for children of needy families that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. The programs are funded by state and federal sources. Health advocates said keeping the programs intact is even more important in these tough economic times when more people might need public assistance.
A legal debate has begun in Philadelphia, with the city and Fox Chase Cancer Center arguing the merits of surrendering a quarter of Burholme Park to keep the hospital and research facility in the city. The expansion requires 19 acres of the 69-acre park, and would encompass most of the land that makes up the privately run Burholme Park Golf Center. A lawyer representing a group of neighbors argued that leasing active parkland is unprecedented and that it goes against the will of Robert Waln Ryerss, whose 1895 bequest of his mansion and surrounding property created the park. Fox Chase has looked at other options, including moving to Delaware, if it’s not allowed to expand into Burholme Park.
A new Illinois law strengthens protections against discrimination based on the results of genetic tests that can pinpoint someone's risk of disease. Advocates hope the law will offer peace of mind to people who might otherwise be dissuaded from undergoing such tests because they fear repercussions from their employer or health insurer. Genetic testing can show a person's risk for cancer, heart disease and other ailments, as well as lead to lifesaving treatment. But some people won't get the tests because they fear the information will be used against them, the advocates say.
Health insurer WellPoint Inc. spent $890,000 in the second quarter to lobby the federal government on several healthcare-related issues, according to a report filed with the House clerk's office. WellPoint lobbied on Medicare funding, reauthorization of a children's health insurance program, health information technology, health savings accounts, issues related to the uninsured, insurance market reform, generic drugs, and other matters.
Leaders of Akron General Medical Center are coming out publicly against plans for a for-profit, physician-owned hospital in northern Summit County, OH. A group of Akron General department chairs recently launched a campaign against a 100-bed, for-profit hospital that physician investors want to build in partnership with General's cross-town rival, Summa Health System. The Akron General doctors argue that the physician-owned hospital will attract affluent, well-insured patients with less-complicated cases, leaving Akron's nonprofit hospitals stuck caring for uninsured patients and those with costly, complex problems.
