Healing with Heart from Moss Communications

Committing to Excellence

All of us hear about how our organizations are committed to excellent patient care. But what does that mean? This reflection, Committing to Excellence, from the Moss Communications book, Healing with Heart, uses an unlikely analogy of the Super Bowl in talking about excellence in health care.

Healing with Heart is a practical, daily tool that health care professionals and health care organizations as a whole can use to hone their vision of excellence and move day-by-day in the direction of greater excellence in patient care. The following excerpt from Healing with Heart’s reflection, Committing to Excellence gives practical examples of how excellence can play out in health care:

Sunday is the Super Bowl. Those who love the game will be glued to the TV. Everyone else must wonder what the attraction is to kicking a ball down a field. The appeal is not just the sport, but also the drama. It is an opportunity to be recognized as the best, and that is measured by winning.

Hospitals, believe it or not, share some similarities with football. Obviously, our work isn’t about blocking and tackling to a goal line. Yet, there are some common features. All of us have the inner desire to excel. We want to defeat heart disease, avoidable cancers and diabetes. We want to reduce infant mortality and birth defects. We are combating skyrocketing medical costs, careless use of resources and poor communications among teams and departments. And, we are competing against ourselves to reduce medical errors, save lives, improve safety, and make our facilities more efficient, clean, and healthy places to work and serve those entrusted to our care.

What does commitment look like in a medical facility? It is the radiologist who is extraordinarily careful, who takes a second and third look at a film and notices something that no one else has seen. It is the lab technician who carefully checks her work or the food service worker who suggests an array of low-fat dishes in the cafeteria. It is the nurse who consistently and conscientiously makes the effort to ensure clear lines of communications among all team members involved in her patient’s care. It is the resident who brings fresh eyes to a diagnosis, the plumber who works overtime to find a corroded pipe before it bursts, the PBX operator who makes a special effort to be pleasant even when the caller is not, and the IT technician who keeps her knowledge, skills, and our equipment updated so she can help us when there is a problem. It is the medical team who directs patients to make healthier lifestyle choices, and the department managers who find more efficient ways to run their departments while supporting the goal of patient safety….