Service

In health care, there is no such thing as “normal business hours.” Babies insist on being born at 3 a.m. A car crash or bursting appendix can land a patient in the Emergency Room at noon or midnight or 5 a.m. To prevent infections, the cleanliness of hospital rooms is just as important at 4 a.m. as at 4 p.m.

So what’s a unit-based team to do? Full participation in a team’s performance improvement work from all members on all shifts can send service and quality scores soaring—while shifts left out in the cold can drag down a whole department. It’s hard enough ensuring all members of a single shift are on board.

But getting everyone onboard around the clock is a daunting challenge. Shifts that pass in the night may be oblivious to the other’s particular challenges and culture. They might not fully understand how their own work affects the other shift’s workflow. Rivalries and finger-pointing can ensue.

NIGHT OWLS IN THE LAB

As the double doors swing open, cold night air blasts into the receiving bay at the Regional Reference Laboratory in North Hollywood, California. Employees are ready, bundled up in knit scarves and hoodies. It’s 11:30 p.m. on a mid-February night, and couriers are delivering gray cooler bags filled with vials and tubes of specimens from all over Southern California. Clinics from Kern County in the north to San Diego, nearly 180 miles south, have closed for the evening. Now all of those blood tests and urine samples have to be processed and analyzed so providers can detect disease or spot the warning signs of a developing chronic condition.

At the specimen processing department, the graveyard shift is the busiest. “We’re like the mailroom,” says Leland Chan, supervisor and management co-lead. More than 10,000 specimens go to the automated chemistry department during the graveyard shift, compared with about 4,300 in the morning and nearly 9,000 at night.

Michael Aragones, the labor co-lead, likens the three shifts to gears all rotating together and powering each other forward. But not so long ago, the gears were getting jammed up.

Building resentments

Something was going on: Staff members on each shift thought the workload wasn’t being distributed equally—and they were getting the short end of the stick. Employees with different duties on the same shift felt the same way about their peers.

“There was a lot of ‘back talk’ between the shifts,” says Aragones, a lab assistant II and member of SEIU UHW. “People would say, ‘How come they are doing this or that?’ and ‘How come I have so much work?’ ”

The unit-based team was the vehicle for improving the workflow. Team members from all shifts got involved collecting, collating and analyzing data about the specimen count, hour by hour.

Riverside EVS attendant Virginia Gonzalez, a United Steelworkers Local 7600 member.

The results revealed why employees were feeling overworked: Between 2008 and 2010, the number of specimens going to bacteriology, for instance, increased from fewer than 4,000 to more than 5,000. Moreover, the time of night that most specimens arrived had changed. The lab used to see a big spike around 9:30 p.m.; now the rush came about 11 p.m. So the team adjusted the start and end time of the graveyard shift to match the flow of work coming in.

“At first, there was a lot of resistance,” Chan says, with employees worried about child care arrangements and traffic. The data, however, “gave us a better understanding of the workflow,” which let staff members see why they were being asked to make changes. “It was the UBT that helped solve that.”

 “It wasn’t managers saying, ‘Well, you just have to,’ ” Aragones says. “We have to look at workflow for the whole department, not just one shift. It’s like a spider web. You pull one strand, and it affects the whole thing.”

Now that the work is flowing better, the UBT is working on new initiatives.

“The UBT makes my life easier,” says Chan. “It allows me to work more closely with the crew because we are on equal terms. Sometimes, as a manager, you don’t have all the answers. They do the work, they are the experts.”

COOKING UP CAMARADERIE

It is 7:15 p.m. in the kitchen of the Downey Medical Center. “Huddddlllle!” shouts Francisco Vargas, a gentle giant of a man. The sound of his booming voice echoes off the tile floors and stainless steel work surfaces. One of about 20 SEIU UHW members working the night shift in the Food and Nutrition department, Vargas gathers the troops before they begin to wash dinner trays and deliver late meals to patients.

Assistant Department Administrator Patricia Villareal and her union partner Amelia Cervantes review new data on the team’s improvement projects, such as cooking less soup on weekends so less is wasted, and give a reminder about clocking in accurately.

The huddle ends with a team cheer—“Work hard, stay positive!”—and with that, food service kitchen worker Nancy Rudeas, an SEIU UHW member, and a colleague scurry off to prepare two late dinner trays. They double-check to see that a patient’s special request for green tea is being filled (it is).

“I love doing this,” Rudeas says, heading up on the elevator.

A few late tray deliveries have become a fact of life for the department, a consequence of abandoning set meal times in favor of a “room service” model: Patients simply make a phone call when they are ready for a meal, just like a hotel guest might.

This patient-centered innovation meant the workflow changed. Foreseeable peaks and valleys in cooking and cleaning became a less predictable, variable demand. Tasks that once had been the domain of one shift or the other “leaked” into the next shift. Tensions rose among employees as the distribution of work was thrown into flux.

“Because we have a UBT, we could sit down together and ask, ‘How can we get this resolved?’ ” says Villareal.

Together, the team experimented with adjusting start times for different jobs in the department until it settled on a mix that’s working. “The morning picks up for the night shift, and the night shift picks up for the morning,” she says.

From OK to great

The department set out to improve its customer service scores in September 2008. Though a respectable 86.7 percent of patients surveyed agreed with the statement “the people serving my meals were polite and professional,” that was nonetheless among the lowest scores in the Southern California region.

Together, the UBT members came up with a script that encourages food service workers to introduce themselves by name, ask if they can open any containers, and—most crucially—ask if there is anything else they can get for the patients. By consistently using the script, by October 2010, the score shot up to 99 percent.

Night-shift workers like Rudeas have contributed to that success. The shifts share information in huddles and bulletin boards.

“What goes on during the day, we know at night,” she says. “And what goes on at night, they know during the day.”

A SWEEPING SUCCESS

The Environmental Services department at Riverside Medical Center is continuing its winning streak: In 2010, it went 260 days without a workplace injury. The UBT received a huge banner congratulating it on the achievement, and the co-leads thought it would be nice if each team member signed it before hanging it up.

The banner remained out for a few days to make sure all staffers had a chance to sign—including the workers who come in at 11 p.m. for the graveyard shift. Only then was the banner hung up on the unit wall.

“This made a huge difference,” says Angel Pacheco, who will become the new management co-lead in May and who himself works the night shift. “This actually shows that everyone is involved and can take pride and ownership.” After all, performance metrics are measured by department, not shift, and night shift workers contributed to creating a safer workplace as much as their day shift counterparts.

The EVS team posts a flipchart sheet after every monthly UBT meeting with three to four important items of information to pass on to the rest of the staff. Each shift reviews the sheet at a daily huddle held at the beginning of each shift. The quick review of UBT business, including key performance metrics, follows the team’s stretching exercises that have helped reduce workplace injuries and won it recognition throughout KP.

The sheet hangs on the door of the supply closet, where each staff member comes when starting work to get carts, trash bags and keys to the offices they have to clean. This strategic placement ensures workers from all shifts have access to the daily UBT updates.

Face time matters

Face-to-face communication augments written communication and helps build the camaraderie that helps teams improve performance. For instance, Pacheco makes a point of visiting the night workers in the outlying medical office buildings—he drives an hour to Temecula to see one employee.

“It’s worth it,” he says. “I just take the time to reflect on things.”

Paula Cunningham, an EVS attendant and member of Steelworkers Local 7600, is one of four union members on the 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift responsible for passing information from the UBT’s representative group meeting to her shift colleagues.

“They trust us to deliver the information to them,” says Cunningham, whose work schedule is adjusted so she can attend representative group meetings in the early afternoon. “We talk frequently and rely heavily on huddles.” Other night shift workers also rotate into the group’s meetings.

Because he’s an on-call employee, Robert Casillas works all the shifts, so he has insights into what makes each shift unique.

The morning shift is more hectic, he says. The evening work is much calmer. More people are cleaning sections solo, but they pass one another in the hallways and share information with each other then.

“We have our communications plan, which we share with the other staff,” Casillas says. “We don’t want anyone to think we’re hiding stuff. And when the information comes from us, it’s less like a demand from management. It’s more about figuring out ideas to help us do our work.”

Sometimes, seeing the hospital at the end of the day as they do, it is night shift employees who spur the entire department into action.

The night workers noticed the hospital was running low on privacy curtains. When the ones soiled during the day were taken down, there were not enough from the laundry to replace them. Cunningham brought the information to the representative group, and the co-leads secured more curtains.

“What affects the night shift,” she says, “usually affects all of us.”

After a false start, the diagnostic imaging department at Woodland Hills Medical Center has found its stride. Its results are impressive: By drawing on the wide experience of the team, it’s improving workflow and boosting attendance.

To get those results, the department created one large UBT with several subcommittees and involved a physician champion. Two radiology summits, which were held to set priorities, included the whole team: 

• More than 160 employees and physicians who see a quarter-million patients a year.
• Staff in eight far-flung clinics as well as throughout the medical center. They range in age from late teens to 40-year veterans of Kaiser Permanente.
• Team members in eight areas of expertise, including ultrasound, MRI, CAT scan, nuclear medicine, mammography, general x-ray, and special procedures.  

From confusion to clarity

At first, the team’s diverse skills and experience flummoxed the department-based team (the term Woodland Hills uses instead of unit-based team).  

“We didn’t know the scope of our work,” says Selena Marchand, a lead sonographer and labor co-lead. “The old DBT got stalled talking about things like the doctors’ parking lot.”

A secret society?

In addition, says Marchand, the representative group—which was working without a facilitator—didn’t communicate with its co-workers about the DBT’s projects. “They thought we were some sort of secret society,” says Marchand, a member of SEIU UHW. 

The team restructured in October 2009, electing one delegate from each “modality,” as the areas of expertise are known, to the representative group.

“Pushing responsibility and accountability back to different modalities has been one of our successes,” says Mike Bruse, the department administrator and management co-lead. “We’re focused on things that we can control in our department.”

Summits get everyone involved

The co-leads convened two department-wide summits to focus on improving team performance and set priorities. Staff members brainstormed about what the challenging issues facing the department were and wrote them on flip chart pages on the wall. Then, each employee attached a sticky note to the issues that most concerned them. The team and managers set out to tackle the seven issues that received the most tags. As the work got under way, progress reports were posted in the employee break room to keep everyone on the team—not just the representatives—informed.

Better workflow

The department also improved the way it distributes film to radiologists, so that patients’ results get to primary care physicians faster. Before the change, technicians were forced to constantly interrupt doctors to read films. Now, there is a tally sheet on each radiologist’s door indicating how many films he or she is reading. This allows techs to know who is available to read a film—and allows radiologists to work undisturbed. An aide to the technologists tracks the process, acting as a traffic controller.

“It was a relatively simple thing that improved satisfaction and patient care a lot,” says Mark Schwartz, MD, who represents physicians on the UBT. “And it didn’t cost any money.”

Better attendance

The team also improved attendance, decreasing last-minute sick calls by 14 days from the end of 2009 to October 2010. They beat the Lab Department in a friendly competition two quarters in a row and were rewarded with a barbeque. To do this, team members simplified presentation of attendance data and posted up-to-the-minute metrics.  

Beyond these gains, management co-lead Bruse says the most significant change is employees’ confidence in their own ability to make improvements.

“Our meetings used to be ‘complain to Mike,’ ” he said. “These days, when people see a problem, they take steps to solve it themselves.”

Imagine developing a severe cough and teeth-chattering chills. You want to be seen by a doctor but no one really understands you: Not the call center operator with whom you try to make an appointment; not the receptionist who checks you in; not the medical assistant who takes your temperature and blood pressure. Not even the doctor who speaks quickly and uses complicated medical terms.

“When you come in for medical care, it’s already like a foreign land,” says Kathleen Kearney, the manager and the UBT co-lead for the Obstetrics and Gynecology department at San Jose Medical Center.  “If you don’t speak English, it can be downright frightening.”

Giving patients better access

Kaiser Permanente has long been committed to providing language access in the form of interpretive services for its non-English speaking members. The Ob/Gyn unit-based team in San Jose has taken the additional step of creating a Spanish-speaking module, a sort of one-stop shop for Spanish-speaking patients.

The idea for the module came from Joseph Derrough, MD, who recognized that good patient care involves more than just the patient and the physician in the exam room. It includes each interaction, from making an appointment to checking in and being assigned a room.

“I realized that we had a significant percentage of patients who only spoke Spanish, and we could do better service to them by providing linguistic and culturally competent care,” Dr. Derrough says. “We had staff that spoke Spanish, but they weren’t all in the same place. My vision was that we could create a clinic module where, from registration to examination, the patient was spoken to in her own language.”

Making it happen

The unit-based team made it happen.

“From the time they walk in the door, every patient should receive the same level of care regardless of the language they speak,” says Glenda Morrison, a medical assistant, SEIU UHW chief shop steward and the UBT co-lead.

But in the beginning, the frontline staff members, including Morrison, were skeptical.

“Since we were already serving Spanish-speaking patients in our clinic, the question we were asking was, ‘Why is this needed?’ ” Morrison says.

But a visit to the Spanish-speaking Medicine module at the Santa Clara campus made them believers. That module has been in place for five years.

“When I saw it in action, a light went off—and I realized that by not speaking to our Spanish-speaking members in their own language, we weren’t providing them with the same care as we were our English-speaking members,” Morrison says.

Overcoming obstacles

Once the team decided to take on the project, it faced some challenges. Offices had to be moved and medical assistants had to be reassigned.

“We had a lot of meetings and a lot of nervous people,” Morrison says.

But again, the Santa Clara example eased fears: “Once they saw how it worked in Santa Clara, we got by-in from the staff and it was easier,” Kearney says.

The module, which opened Sept. 29, includes signage and literature in Spanish. The staff members, from the receptionists and medical assistants to the doctors, are fluent Spanish speakers.  Word about the new module went out through Spanish-speaking television news and newspaper reports. And there was a grand opening.

It’s going well so far, Kearny says, noting that “we have three Spanish-speaking providers each day, and they have appointment capacity for about 20 patients.”

Next steps

Now, the team is looking for ways to quantify the benefits of the new module. It’s hoping to be able to collect patient satisfaction data specifically from Spanish-speaking members to assess the impact, Kearney says.

“If it shows success, we’ll pass the idea on to other teams,” she says.

Meanwhile, the unit is looking at how it can provide culturally competent care for its other monolingual patients.

“We don’t what a certain group to feel singled out,” Morrison says. “We just want them to feel comfortable.”

The employees in Charitable Health Coverage Operations (CHCO) felt good about their Northern California department’s mission—but not so good about how long it took sometimes to help the thousands of low-income children who benefit from KP-subsidized health care.

The department handles the eligibility paperwork for a KP program that provides health coverage to people who don’t qualify for employer-based health coverage or public programs like Medicaid. At the team’s low point in 2005, it had a six-month applications backlog.

“Our primary customers are children,” said Nancy Waring, CHCO customer care manager. “We have over 80,000 children, most of them low income. About 50 percent of our population is Spanish speaking. And the program is completely subsidized by Kaiser.”

Too large a group

In the past, one representative unit-based team encompassed the whole department.  Because employees within the same department were doing very different types of work—processing mail, entering data, processing enrollments, providing customer service, and servicing the regions outside of California—they didn’t share a single set of problems. So the UBT tended to work on departmentwide problems like attendance.

But the single UBT struggled.

 “We basically failed from 2006 to 2009 to do anything,” says Suber Corley, the department’s director, “simply because we were looking at too large a group trying to solve too large a problem.”

So they reorganized. The department now has five UBTs that correspond with employees’ functions.

Setting priorities

The smaller teams set their sites on a number of changes, but they also coordinated with each other on one common goal: to process every application by the 20th of the month.

In their UBT, the mail-room employees decided to look at priorities differently.

“We identified that what we really needed to do was to have a prioritization scheme for every week of the month,” says Victor Romero, CHCO operations manager. He explains that during the first week of January, a recertification application that’s due on April 1 would be low priority in the mail room, whereas a new application—which would need to be processed by January 20 for insurance coverage to begin on February 1—would be high priority. After the 20th, attention moves to the low-priority documents.

The data entry, scanning and enrollment UBTs came up with other solutions, too.

“We instituted several changes in how the application is handled,” says Carl Artis, an enrollment processor team lead and OPEIU Local 29 shop steward. “If we couldn’t process an application, the application was sent back to the customers very early so they could make necessary corrections. We also streamlined our process—there were some things we were doing twice, which wasn’t necessary.”

Artis emphasizes that the changes were developed jointly by frontline workers and managers.

“I have to admit they (the managers) have some really great ideas,” he says, “and they were really able to listen to some great ideas.”

It worked. In October, for the first time in the department’s history, the team was able to process all its new applications by the 20th, so coverage for those applicants could start in November.

“The end result is that poor children did not go without health coverage,” Romero says.

Addressing burnout

In addition to the project to reduce the amount of time it takes to process new applications, the smaller teams have taken on other projects, like reducing burnout among customer service agents who spend all day answering phone calls. They’ve also done charity work together, raising funds to provide school supplies for low-income students at a local high school.

Artis passes on the story of his department’s flourishing UBTs to other members of Local 29.

“I’ve heard some people say, ‘Oh, that’s too much work to take on,’ or, ‘We don’t have the resources we need to address the issue’ or ‘Management would never go for that,’ ” Artis says. “But what I’ve learned is—just try it, and don’t be afraid to fail.”