Medical Center Town Hall Meeting updateWe have been conducting Medical Center Town Hall meetings on a quarterly basis since August 2004. We will be doing a better job in how we organize and manage our future Town Hall meetings. The primary purpose of our meetings will be to communicate our goals, bring closure to things that have been accomplished and to outline our short term 90 day plans. We will recognize outstanding work to keep a focus upon purpose, worthwhile work and making a difference. At the most recent town hall meeting we reviewed the employee satisfaction survey action plans. We had more than 600 department-based action plans focusing on areas of need as identified by the satisfaction survey conducted last July. These action plans, as indicated in previous Currents newsletters, emphasized enhancing communication within and between departments, improving recognition and reward and doing a better job in making everyone feel and understand their value to our organization. Managers are asked to bring forward their 90 day action plan progress updates this month. We also discussed the work of the administrative team in addressing satisfaction-related issues with Medical Center-wide implications. For instance, in July we will implement a “mid-year” change to our calendar year-based Paid Time Off plan to include accrual of supplemental medical leave for eligible employees. (Enhancements made in the past to the PTO plan at the recommendation of the Recruitment and Retention Committee and the supplemental medical leave provision will be posted on the Medical Center intranet). Parking is a very complex issue for MUSC and there is no easy “fix.” Our contract with CARTA has been well received, and we will continue to explore creative ways to address our parking challenges. We will do a better job of communicating our compensation management practices that deal with performance pay, market-based equity adjustments, premium and incentive pay and other practices. This past summer a consultant from a leading national compensation management firm confirmed that our compensation policy and practices are sound. Our next step in the new fiscal year will be to seek assistance from a compensation management firm to help us focus on any occupational groups that are not market competitive. At the Town Hall Meeting we also discussed where we are headed with our “hardwiring excellence” plan. Our tactical plan was on target with its goals over the past several years, and our new plan will realign our goals under broad “pillars of excellence” including service, people, quality, finance and growth. We will be assisted by the Studer Group and there will be a higher level of engagement and accountability to achieve our goals. We will place particular emphasis on the provider of choice (patient satisfaction) and employer of choice (employee satisfaction) goals that fall under the service and people pillars. Our tactical plan teams will be replaced with service excellence teams including: standards, measurement, service recovery, reward and recognition, communication and patient satisfaction. The patient satisfaction teams will involve entity-based teams including pediatrics and women, inpatient, outpatient and ancillary, ED and IOP. We will do a better job developing skills of our supervisory employees through quarterly leadership development training programs. In the future we will implement an “accountability-based” leadership performance evaluation system directly tied to our goals. At next quarter’s Town Hall Meeting we will give an update on our “hardwiring excellence” progress and related goals including JCAHO readiness, Phase I hospital facility construction update, information technology (advanced point-of-care system) progress, and other issues. Thank you very much. W. Stuart Smith Vice President for Clinical Operations and Executive Director, MUSC Medical Center Friday, March 17, 2006 |
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