By Rik Ganderton
President and CEO
We call it alignment.
But another way to describe our annual Personal Business Commitments (PBCs) is teamwork.
My PBCs set out the direction for all other team members, vice-presidents, directors and everyone throughout the hospital. As autumn begins, this is a good time of year for us to refocus on our commitments to our hospital.
As you can read in my PBCs, which we publish publicly each year, we are focused on quality and constant improvement at Rouge Valley Health System.
I’m proud to report that our Deficit Elimination Plan of 2008-11 is drawing to a successful completion during the next six months, with our promises kept – to maintain patient volumes and improve overall patient care, while ending all overspending.
The plan enabled us to jump over other equally high hurdles, through our collective ongoing implementation of the Lean management philosophy.
As CEO, I focus on challenges ahead. But allow me to pause here and reflect on the sweeping achievements you have all made for our patients. Because of your application of Lean our patients now:
• Go home sooner – as a result of improved patient flow and your discharge planning;
• Get lab and diagnostic imaging results faster, in hours rather than days;
• Wait less time for care in our emergency department;
• Walk less distance in pre-admit clinics, because our professionals now come to them;
• Cancel fewer surgeries thanks to enhanced pre-surgical screening; and
• Waste less of their time filling in forms.
The successful teamwork of the Deficit Elimination Plan and Lean initiatives have also set the platform on which we all stand today. Now our focus moves more toward our four dimensions: Access to Care; Service Excellence; Fiscal Responsibility; and Team Engagement.
The PBC process provides us all with an important checklist on those dimensions. As we check off our achievements throughout the fiscal year, we can see our individual and team goals coming to fruition for our patients.
There is something cathartic about putting a check mark next to an item on a to-do list isn’t there? Our PBCs are our team checklists. Yours will be different from mine. But all PBCs focus on the same set of objectives and targets found in mine.
You’ll also notice that the PBCs are now lined up with our overall leadership tools, as shown on the Strategic Linkage page, which directly aligns our: Mission Vision Values; Strategic Plan-On-A-Page; Transformation Themes; and Dimensions.
To further reinforce our four dimensions, we are labeling each our stories in the Echo magazine with the relevant dimension to demonstrate how everyone is working toward the same set of objectives.
By harnessing your focused efforts to constantly improve health care for our patients we will achieve our vision to be the best at what we do.
Thank you for your engagement, your creativity and your daily commitment to Rouge Valley Health System.