Harnessing our greatest asset: Solving margin issues by investing in frontline leaders

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The rate of change in combination with the scope and magnitude and the need for increased efficacy in healthcare operations are on the rise, especially with the advent of a plethora of patient needs in the post-COVID-19 world. Senior leaders in the field are faced with various operational and financial challenges on account of the new and rapidly rising patient requirements in the healthcare sector, and, instead of optimising existing resources to meet current challenges, they are often persuaded to just add on new programmes, leaving the existing programmes to languish. Thus, to circumvent some of the major issues in healthcare operations, a more effective strategy has to be pursued than the usual one of simply buying and implementing a new productivity system with updated targets or performance benchmarks. The solution is to assess the efficacy and profitability of existing improvement programmes and resources in the advent of a new set of requirements: deploying burst versus incremental improvement; engaging middle managers to enable their solutions; and achieving organisation speed, spread and scalability across the organisation [Caldwell, C., Cook, K., (2020), ‘Achieving speed, spread, scalability, and sustainability in health systems’, American College of Healthcare Executives-Cluster Session, Clearwater, FL, 17–20th January]. This paper describes how Dignity Health East Valley was able to optimise the use of existing performance improvement resources and deploy an accelerated improvement structure to achieve rapid gains, followed by incremental improvement to both sustain and further the gains made. The approach included mentoring middle managers to become adaptive change agents and achieve 5 per cent improvement in margins in six months. The burst method described in this paper is based on the findings from the research undertaken by top-performing hospitals that identified five essential characteristics that healthcare’s frontline leaders are expected to possess and which are a clear mark of their leadership skills and competence [Caldwell, C., Cook, K., (2020), ‘Achieving speed, spread, scalability, and sustainability in health systems’, American College of Healthcare Executives-Cluster Session, Clearwater, FL, 17–20th January]. The paper presents the background to this research as well as the structure that builds these top-performer capabilities in the front-line team in order for them to lead change and drive its implementation. The positive results that emerged from the leadership training provided to frontline leaders are substantial, including improved margin, higher patient experience and higher employee engagement.