The non-profit system comprises more than 50 locations, yet boasts a less than 10% turnover rate for its nurses.
“When you think about workforce, you hear about burnout and stress in healthcare workers,” Evaline Alessandrini, MD, COO of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told Becker’s Healthcare Podcast. “A lot of times, it’s less about the traditional human resources benefits, [and is] more about the hassles and the inefficiencies and the workarounds that people have to deal with in the healthcare industry.”
Dr. Alessandrini has been COO of the system for the last three years, but began her career as a pediatric emergency medicine physician. She said that her experiences from her clinical work deeply inform the leadership decisions she makes about the system’s workforce.
“As a chief operating officer, and as someone who thinks about processes and the work that we do every day, my goal is to work with our Cincinnati Children’s team to make sure that we have an operational excellence model that make it really clear how people can do things in the most efficient way possible, to avoid those workarounds and importantly, for everybody to function at the top of their skill set, because that helps them to bring and find incredible joy in their work,” she said.
To ensure this, the system leads by its four core values: respect everyone, tell the truth, make a difference and work as a team.
This focus on workforce well-being also goes hand in hand with the system’s commitment to growth. Dr. Alessandrini said she and her team often focus on ways to build clinical care teams so that they can deliver the best care to young people. Cincinnati Children’s is also building and expanding many of its locations to ensure children seeking primary care don’t need to travel far, particularly for mental health services.
“One of the things that we’re particularly proud of is embedding mental health services into schools,” she said. “Having social workers and psychologists based in schools, and even some other pediatric services, [we have] primary care centers located in schools that serve entire families … and that is a huge bonus to families for convenience and access.”
Cincinnati Children’s also has a mobile care unit that is designed to travel to schools and other area locations to provide services like primary care, dental and cardiology.
“There are 500,000 kids right here in our Cincinnati primary service area, and we want to make sure that kids that have more routine pediatric issues are getting care close to home,” she said.
