Better Never Stops - The Virginia Mason Institute Podcast Virginia Mason Institute

Advancing diversity, equity and inclusion in healthcare has become a strategic imperative for all leaders in healthcare. But to make lasting progress, we can’t just treat the symptoms; we must address the underlying condition, which is systemic inequity. Learn how leaders at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health have embedded equity into their improvement methods, training, and tools. 

Leading with Daily Management is an important and foundational component of ensuring patients receive quality, timely care, while providing frontline staff the information they need to effectively manage their work. Our latest episode of Better Never Stops features Neha Patel, Senior Director in Ambulatory Care at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health and Clinical Assistant Professor at University of Washington, as she shares how her teams have evolved Daily Management practices to better connect front-line leaders to executives.

Developing a culture of continuous improvement is an imperative as healthcare organizations face unprecedented challenges and strive for sustainability. Join our executive leadership panel for this roundtable discussion and learn about crucial lessons from Warwick Business School's recently published independent study of the NHS-VMI partnership. The research reveals the effectiveness of applying a systems approach to learning and improvement across five NHS trusts in partnership with NHS Improvement. Our roundtable explores crucial lessons for leaders as they work to improve patient outcomes, population health, access, equity, and the overall patient experience. Topics include:

• Leadership models, behaviors and practices that were observed to be essential components of leading change in organizations
• How to enable “partnership” ways of working through practices and mechanisms that foster and maintain collaborative ways of working
• Cultural elements necessary for the successful adoption of an organization-wide improvement program

In our second episode of Better Never Stops, Virginia Mason Institute Senior Partner Melissa Lin interviews Dana Nelson-Peterson, Vice President of Nursing Operations at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, who shares what happens when you trust a management system and improvement process to solve your toughest challenges. Dana shares her story of leading a critical part of Virginia Mason’s Covid response.

Chris Backous, Executive Partner of Transformation Services, interviews two of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health’s improvement experts, Chris Stewart and Jackie Hartke, as they share their experiences overcoming the challenge of supporting the spread of our management method across a newly expanded health system.

In this session we explore what it means to take a systems approach to healthcare equity by purposefully embedding equity concepts in improvement methods, training, and tools. We discuss practical ways to focus improvement work on the experiences of historically marginalized and underrepresented communities to support safe, culturally responsive care. We also discuss and share tools that others can immediately adopt and apply to their own work.