With six hospitals, more than 21,000 employees, and a 2,400-member management team, NewYork-Presbyterian’s (NYP) Patient Centered Care Department (PCC) quickly identified the need to offer an improved and consistent patient experience as a priority. In late 2012, PCC conducted a “Back to Basics” internal survey to assess how consistently best practices were being utilized within the various areas of the hospital. Survey results were mixed: In some areas, units had hardwired best practices, while in others, they had deviated from their original form or fallen out of practice entirely. The need to retrain and reset expectations for both front-line staff and leaders became evident.
While relaunching the best practices might help to address some of the inconsistencies, PCC took the opportunity to go deeper and retrain leaders on the fundamentals of leadership. This would provide the tools and structure needed for leadership to be successful in cascading this training to their teams. As a result, the NYP Leadership Boot Camp was born.
Program Details
Focusing on the principles of Coaching and Communicating, Empathetic Communication, Self-Accountability, Service Recovery, and Setting Clear Expectations, the eight-hour “Boot Camp” aimed to help leaders feel more confident in themselves. Some 2,100 NYP leaders completed the course in three months and rated the training a 90/100 on leader satisfaction. The training empowered this population to engage their teams in redefining the patient experience.
Following Boot Camp, each participant received a Boot Camp Binder of best practices and Manager In-Service guides to reinforce the sustainability of the message and ensure consistent practices and expectations were carried back to front-line staff. The binder comprised 20 chapters, including:
1. An overview of how to deliver a Manager’s In-Service Guide
2. Executive Summary of the binder contents
3. Key questions for leadership to ask each month to reinforce different topics
4. A 14-month curriculum of monthly Manager’s In-Service Guides, including:
- How to have difficult discussions with families and visitors
- Best practices in managing pain
- How to prepare to deliver the content in the Manager’s In-Service guide
- The importance of best practices
- An outline of best practice behaviors
- Metrics to use to measure success
- Commitments section for front-line staff and leaders
- Daily hospital-wide huddle message
Results
Early results include an improvement in the Press Ganey Average Patient Satisfaction Score of 0.4 points across all sites and service lines. The December 2013 topic of “Hourly Rounding” resulted in an increase in the frequency and quality of patient rounds conducted, as measured by the Press Ganey Standard Overall Scores in the Inpatient Service Line.
To maintain the improvement in the NYP Patient Experience, “Communicating with Empathy” classes for the 21,000-plus NYP staff began in November 2013 and continued in 2014, along with quarterly Leadership Day Camps.
