1. Clearly establish your mission and distribute it to your colleagues. Before you measure how closely you are following your hospital’s mission, you need to clearly establish what that mission is. For Hospital Sisters Health System, that meant analyzing the message of St. Francis and applying that message to a contemporary hospital system. “Our sisters are Franciscan, and St. Francis was a storyteller, so one of the pieces of our mission is to always tell stories about our successes and failures,” she says. “When everything is said and done, what impact do we have? In our colleague updates, leadership meetings and information we provide on our progress to the sisters, we write down the stories we’ve received from patients and their families.”
Whether your hospital’s mission is to care for mind, body and spirit of the patient or focus on the underserved members of your community, you should publish that mission in brochures and pamphlets and distribute them to colleagues and patients. The more visible your mission is around the hospital, the more likely your colleagues will be to consider it in their day-to-day actions.
2. Solicit feedback from patients and colleagues. As well as soliciting feedback on wait times, clinical care and employee satisfaction, Ms. Deich says Sacred Heart Hospital solicits feedback from patients and colleagues about how well the hospital is representing the health system’s mission. “We’ve put a lot of thought into how we would measure whether we are living our mission,” she says. “It’s a variety of different measures. We ask how well we’re managing patient pain, for example. In our patient satisfaction surveys, we ask, ‘How did we manage your pain?’ Because we’re trying to care for the whole person — body, mind and spirit — we need to provide medications but respond to patients in other ways as well.”
Sacred Heart Hospital also uses its colleague satisfaction survey to ask staff members how the hospital’s senior leadership is demonstrating the values of the organization.
3. Require hospital administrators to publicly demonstrate your mission. Once Sacred Heart Hospital administrators have the results of their patient and community satisfaction surveys, they use the information to hold their administrators accountable. If your hospital has a clear mission of service like Sacred Heart, your administrators should be active service participants, Ms. Deich says. It’s not enough to come up with an attractive mission statement and print it on a brochure: You need to make the effort to demonstrate your mission outside of work.
Because of this, Sacred Heart requires its leaders to participate in a community group related to health or well-being. “If you’re a leader, we want you to be active in the community and demonstrate your commitment and interest in the community,” she says. “If I happen to like a community group and be part of it already, but it doesn’t have anything to do with health or well-being, that doesn,t count. Our executive team has consciously looked at the list of community groups and decided which ones fit our mission.”
