Guest Blog: "New Leadership Methods Needed if Person-Centered Care to Blossom"
The following is a guest blog by Anthony Cirillo:
The Joint Commission recently emphasized the need for more involvement from healthcare administrators, executives and trustees in preventing medical errors. It also recommended using successful methods from other industries to improve quality in healthcare. According to the Commission involved administrators, physician leaders and other figures of authority can drive improvements.
Improvements in quality across the healthcare spectrum are to be lauded. But consider this recent and unsurprising finding from a recent study by Planetree and the Picker Institute: What is most vital to patients "has little to do with the clinical, technological or scientific aspects of medicine. These are taken for granted as minimum standards of care. Far more meaningful - and memorable - are compassionate interactions, access to information, involvement of loved ones, a healing physical environment, and an approach that supports mind, body and spirit."
I have been writing a lot about person-centered care and stirring the pot so to speak. When readers write back, they pin a lot of the stagnation in implementing person-centered care on leadership.
A couple of recent Harvard articles might hold the answer to the leadership question. The article, Are You Ready to Manage in an Irrational World?, is a kind of primer for the second.
I particularly like this quote: "Instead of a management philosophy centered around the manager as the play-caller, assigning tasks and motivating people to carry them out, we are told by the neuroscientists that the new management job is one of facilitating more of a customized, do-it-yourself process centered around each newly-energized employee, one centered on questions (often leading) rather than direction."
In the command and control, checklist, regulated environment it is hard to imagine let alone convince leadership that adopting this stance will actually help you check off the checklist sooner. Yet when you help create context and then empower people to come up with their own solutions, creativity is heightened, new ways emerge and there is a passion around it because those who helped craft the solutions did so because they authentically wanted things to change.
The second article, Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis, takes the stance that economy recovers, things won't return to normal and a different mode of leadership will be required. That leadership will embrace staff empowerment, collaboration and shared problem solving.
Fundamental shifts come from self-driven authentic change by people empowered to do so. I think we have created the illusion of some of this in the person-centered care arena through scripts, training around how to deliver red carpet service, etc. But all of these miss the more systemic issue. People change because they want to change. Leadership has to create that context.
Are long term care leaders up to this challenge? Are health care management programs looking at these new methods? And is the current crop of enlightened long term leaders prepared to mentor and teach others?
Anthony Cirillo, FACHE, ABC is a health care consultant, elder advocate and blogger for Wellsphere in the area of aging and senior health. He consults with long-term care facilities and is available for management retreats and association keynotes. He is the author of "Who Moved My Dentures?" His company, Fast Forward Consulting empowers long-term care organizations to change the experience and leverage it in their marketing. Their "Experience Makeover" is a four-step process that assesses the employee and resident experience, redesigns it, equips and empowers everyone to change it and makes it an indelible part of the culture. To read more, go to www.4wardfast.com and www.anthonyssong.com.