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Healthcare leaders are facing many competing priorities as they look to strengthen their business today and create future growth. While focusing on process improvement and strategic initiatives is critical for driving long term success, you can realize quick, sustainable results through the implementation of rounding, surveys, audits and checklists. These tools equip you with information that allows you to understand the needs of your employees and consumers, and empowers other leaders and front-line staff in the organization to do the same. At the same time, they provide employees with a chance to share their voice as well as a clearly defined process that they should follow.

As a leader, these tools give you the ability to make strategic decisions that will increase efficiencies and profitability, attract and retain skilled employees and improve care for consumers and keep them healthy, ultimately enabling your organization to gain market share and be competitive in the future.

Attract and Retain Skilled Employees and Leaders

Human capital is a vital resource for the success of a healthcare organization which makes both attracting and retaining high performing employees critical to success. To do so, it’s critical that you know your employees needs and positively impact change. Through rounding you can do that while empowering managers, directors and senior leaders across the entire enterprise to do the same. Similarly, surveys allow you to get a pulse of the entire organization, or a subset of the population on what is working and what’s not. With the information gathered through rounding and surveys you will be able to be a better leader as you take feedback from your employees into account as you make decisions. In addition, checklists that enable your employees to have clearly defined processes laid out before them can also make sustaining change easier. By taking an approach that clearly defines what’s expected of your staff through checklists as well as incorporating their feedback via rounding and surveys into the evolution of processes, you will not only improve process but show them that they are valued.

Rounding also creates a systematic process for identifying and recognizing talent. Asking employees and consumers to name individuals that go above and beyond offers insights on who your high performing employees are and gives you the chance to recognize these individuals for the work they’re doing. You also have the chance to hear firsthand from employees on who could fill your leadership pipeline in the future.

Be More Efficient and Profitable While Improving the Cost and Quality of Care

The goals set by you and your fellow leaders are critical for driving success by identifying ways to cut waste in order to drive growth. With rounding, audits, surveys and checklists you can accelerate and increase the rate of change that you’re hoping to create.

As you seek to drive organizational goals, rounding can be an important part of cascading these goals and communicating them to the group. For instance, rounding questions can be created that measure goals related to time to answer call lights, patient falls, and pressure ulcers and readmission rates. During rounding, the importance of the goals you’ve set forth can be shared and obstacles that may make it difficult to achieve them can also be communicated by your staff.

These tools also increase visibility of progress against goals you’re trying to impact and create buy in to the changes you’ve set forth to reach them. They also give you the opportunity to observe firsthand how new processes impact employees and consumers, and strategically make modifications while tracking progress.

Improve Care for Consumers and Keep Them Healthy

Rounding on your consumers, your patients and their families, gives you the opportunity to hear firsthand about their experience. This can help you address their immediate needs while also hearing what some of their challenges are and what’s working. By taking the feedback from the round and addressing their needs you can help to improve their care while also showing that you’re invested in their well-being. At the same time, as a leader being able to have a more personal encounter with a consumer will be beneficial as you seek to develop new processes or implement new initiatives. Surveys offer similar insights and allow you to quantify feedback and progress over time.

Healthcare organizations that implement rounding, surveys, audits and checklists are positioning themselves for success in the near and long term. These tools give you a holistic approach to feedback that will enable you to attract and retain skilled workers and gain alignment around initiatives while enabling you to become the healthcare provider of choice for your consumers as you’ll be able to better meet their needs.