Healthcare Transformation Can’t Wait: 3 Lessons from Leading Change Across Healthcare Systems
The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated longstanding challenges with patient care and staff engagement in our industry. As leaders, we must look honestly and humbly at the gap between our aspirations and our reality, and we must sign up for the hard work of closing it.
Recent efforts by the National Health Service (NHS) show us both how this can be done and why it’s worth it. In 2021, the NHS concluded a five-year partnership with Virginia Mason Institute, focused on building a culture of continuous improvement at each of five hospital trusts. By the end, three trusts had improved their quality ratings and all five had conducted more than 100 improvement workshops, leading to thousands of hours saved and errors reduced.
Below are three key lessons from their experience that suggest a way forward for organizations worldwide.
Aligning diverse stakeholders
Health systems are notoriously complex, and various stakeholders are just as likely to experience conflict as harmony. To move forward, we need to shift our mindset and behaviors to foster respectful collaboration.
The NHS improvement experience offers a powerful solution in its Transformation Guiding Board (TGB). The TGB brought together all five trust CEOs and select NHS regulators for full-day monthly meetings to provide strategic oversight and share learnings across organizations.
Through the TGB, CEOs and regulators became true partners and trusted collaborators. All CEOs came to refer to the meetings as “the best working day of the month,” and the board continues to meet today.
What was achieved in those meetings can — and should — happen elsewhere. Partnerships like these show a way forward for complex health systems to make meaningful progress on safety, quality and access.
Change starts with leaders
Leaders simply cannot understate the responsibility they have in guiding change within their organizations. The experience of the five NHS trusts proves that when leaders commit fully and visibly, change spreads and cements. When they don’t, the same old problems go unsolved.
Part of that commitment is agreeing to change their own behavior: framing problems so that teams — those closest to the work — can be the ones solving them. This requires leaders to shift from serving as a hero or problem solver to serving as a coach and mentor.
Changing behavior can be incredibly difficult, but leaders who adopt this style usually find it works better for everyone. As best said by Dr. Gary Kaplan, “when we come to the table to learn and transform — beginning with ourselves — the result is powerful.”
The power of embracing a new mindset
The five trusts achieved many tangible results, including time savings and error reductions, but they also succeeded in changing how teams think and talk about safety, waste, budgets and other aspects of care and operations.
As a senior clinician at one trust put it, “I don’t think [our executives] were quite prepared for how this method really shines a light on culture, and exposes behavior, relating to the way we work. It’s made us very open in terms of patient safety. That’s a good thing.”
Although it can’t be captured in a data point, this is the true manifestation of change. Our mindsets, and the dialogues we have with our teams, are what allow individual improvements to last and the daily act of improvement to continue.
The pandemic showed us the time is now
Just as the partnership was ending, the Covid-19 pandemic presented a real-world test of everything the five trusts had learned. They answered the call, using their new improvement tools and culture to decrease the turnaround time for swab testing, “flip” wards between caring for Covid and non-Covid patients, and manage countless other challenges.
Our whole industry can be proud of the grit and ingenuity we’ve shown in response to the pandemic. But our job as leaders is to empower that way of working even without the pretext of crisis. The daily mandates of patient safety, timely care and a respectful workplace are every bit as urgent and demanding of our focus.
By heeding recent lessons from the NHS, we can fulfill our promise to strive for better, every day, for the patients we serve.
Read our key takeaways from the Warwick Business School NHS partnership evaluation including:
- How creating a new management system calls for the whole organization to work together to enhance value
- How leadership must focus on coaching, not control
- How setting targets requires both learning and “unlearning”
- How a Transformation Guiding Board provides a model for collaboration
Watch our roundtable webinar:
Executive Roundtable: Lessons from the NHS-VMI Partnership Evaluation
Our leadership roundtable shares inspiring lessons and guidance based on Warwick Business School’s recently published independent study of the NHS-VMI partnership.
Wendy Korthuis-Smith, Ed.D., M.S., Executive Director
Wendy Korthuis-Smith, Ed.D., M.S., is the executive director at Virginia Mason Institute. Wendy provides leadership and oversees the development of new products and services to strategically assess, identify improvement opportunities, develop and implement transformation and transition plans, and continually evaluate continuous improvement for clients worldwide. Wendy holds significant experience developing and implementing large scale transformation and transition plans. Wendy came to Virginia Mason Institute from Deloitte Consulting, and spent several years prior with the Washington State Governor’s Office where she led state government transformation through the development and implementation of Results Washington, a performance improvement initiative incorporating 53 state government agencies, boards and commissions across five priority goal areas. She worked with Virginia Mason early on in her career as a leadership development consultant. Wendy is trained in the Virginia Mason Production System®.
Wendy Korthuis-Smith, Ed.D., M.S., is the executive director at Virginia Mason Institute. Wendy provides leadership and oversees the development of new products and services to strategically assess, identify improvement opportunities, develop and implement transformation and transition plans, and continually evaluate continuous improvement for clients worldwide. Wendy holds significant experience developing and implementing large scale transformation and transition plans. Wendy came to Virginia Mason Institute from Deloitte Consulting, and spent several years prior with the Washington State Governor’s Office where she led state government transformation through the development and implementation of Results Washington, a performance improvement initiative incorporating 53 state government agencies, boards and commissions across five priority goal areas. She worked with Virginia Mason early on in her career as a leadership development consultant. Wendy is trained in the Virginia Mason Production System®.
