Thank you so much, all of you for being here. The fact that we have our roller skates on, and we are working Monday through Friday, and sometimes on call in our endoscopy units, and now today is early and it's Saturday, and it just shows a lot that you all care so much about your units, so that's wonderful that you're here. So let's talk a little bit about the patient experience and how it really begins with the employee experience. I have no financial relationships with commercial support to disclose. Okay, so let's go over some methods for improving employee experience, the measurement of employee satisfaction. We will discuss ways employee experience enhances the patient experience. Okay, so number one, endoscopy unit culture. The culture of your unit is everything. It's important for you to assess your unit functions from everywhere the patient begins, so that would be out in your clinics. Some of your units may have multiple clinics if you're doing endoscopic procedures for maybe colorectal surgery, pediatrics, pulmonary, things like that. So how does the experience of the patient and the employees begin in those clinics, and then how does that all translate to your endosuite? So it's important for you to really round in all of those areas, build relationships in those areas, get to know who are the unit leads of those areas, and also the staff, and make a presence in any area of which your patient starts and then later ends in your endo unit. And pay close attention to those workflows, the staff interactions, and something that takes a little bit of time and years to develop, but monitoring body language and just staff participation, and really have your eyes and ears on all of the areas. And something very important, and it may feel a little invasive at first to say, or even just uncomfortable or awkward, but I encourage you all to really try this, but a simple question that you can ask staff, anyone on the unit, how is your heart today? How is your heart today? So the heart is in this transient state all of the time, so someone could be not feeling well, someone could have something weighing on them that could affect their work, and so it's important to really check in with everybody and see how your staff and the employees on the unit are doing, because it may impact the day, and you caring about how they are is very important. Happy employees make happy patients. So how do we do that? So let's improve our employee experience. Things that we can do, we can empower staff to participate in a unit-based council. Something like this is really great to have. Your staff can get together without leadership present, they can talk about real issues in a safe space, get together, come up with great ideas, and then later on talk about it with unit leadership. So empower them to have that time to meet regularly, and make sure that you later meet one-on-one with them to review whatever they want to talk about, personal issues, it could be hospital issues, it could be anything, and find ways to really be flexible with them and give them that time. Let them be creative and include all of the staff in this, not just nurses, not just techs, but really everybody. So in this picture here, there are three nurses, and Dr. D'Souza was our director of endoscopy, and you see they're all together presenting our unit-based council project. And this started as something really small. There was a little bit of downtime on our endoscopy unit, and rather than doing nothing, this group of nurses said, you know what, let's come together and let's start a project. So they came up with this amazing project over time, improving inpatient's throughput in our endoscopy suite. And so it was a wonderful project, and they really did this on their own without any nurse leaders, any minimal physician participation. These were nurses on our unit, and they did an amazing job, and later we were able to give them a time to present to the hospital, and it was a nice thing that was great. Okay, so the power of flexibility. So many leaders are type A, okay, type A humans. And that's a wonderful, wonderful thing for many aspects of management, leadership, great. For an endo unit, you must be flexible. There's always a consideration for a plan B, a plan C, a plan D, a plan E. There has to be flexibility. So if it is not in your nature to be a flexible person, believe me, having the smallest amount of flexibility will help so much with anything that could come about. And for the employee, being flexible is a huge satisfier, okay? Sometimes they'd want a trial period of a new process. Maybe they want to try to whatever what they want to trial, give them that option to just simply try something. It's always good to empower someone to make that choice, and if it does not work out, that's okay. Even for something like shifts and scheduling, now I know that there are unions sometimes involved and seniority and things like that, so you may not have as much flexibility, but there could be a possibility of trialing a shift, and that is a big satisfier for an employee as well. Maybe they want a 12-hour shift, but you've historically only ever had 10-hour or 8-hour shifts. It might be something nice to be able to trial. Maybe two employees can start with a 12-hour shift, and something so simple could make your employees very happy. And strongly consider the input from your staff on things like this. Their time off, their work days, that's part of their life. It's very important, so being able to listen and hear is really great for them. And also, elect members of your unit to help you solve problems. They want to be involved, they love that, and it's really part of this process. Build strong leaders on your unit. Encourage them to have active listening. It's more important for them, rather than to take the microphone all the time, to really have their ears open and listen to faculty, staff, anyone that could be on your unit. Be very inquisitive. Solve problems together. There's no need for the leader to solve all the problems. That is a group effort always, and a huge thing is take criticism. It's okay if you make a wrong decision, that's okay. We can restart and completely look from another angle at something, and always give feedback. Give feedback when you say you're going to do something, do it. And always promote education. It's important to allow your staff to get to those conferences, go back to school if they want to go back to school. Help them, support them, make sure if they have a night class that maybe you can alter their schedule to give them that time. And this right here, this photo that I'm sharing, some of the leaders from my unit were hosting a course and teaching nurses and techs from the community about different technical skills. Okay. Now, another thing, a lot of times we focus on, as I'm a nurse leader, but it's not just about my nurses, it's not just about my techs, we want to consider and collaborate, get that input from anesthesia, from fellows, from attendings, from nursing staff, techs, the ancillary staff, the clinic staff. These people are extremely important to work together on any unit issues, and the mindset of all these decisions should really be based on what's best for the patient, of course. So getting that input from everybody is extremely important, and it makes people feel like they are a part of the team and ends up having great input, because you're getting that perspective from everyone. So maybe consider committees that involve all of those key players. So an endoscopy anesthesia task force, where you maybe talk about difficult cases or things we could trial, latest research, things like that, forming a perioperative pod or high reliability unit. So focus on conflict resolution and debriefing, and try to consider any workflow changes that benefit everyone and not just one group member. Okay. This is really so important, employee recognition, and I write, it's never a bad day to bring in cookies, okay? It's never a bad day for anyone. So celebrate achievements, promote hospital and unit-based awards, consider maybe a Sunshine Fund, and that's a fund where everyone throws in a couple of bucks, and then when someone has maybe a baby or someone's getting married, you are, as a unit, maybe you're giving them a gift card, maybe you're giving them some form of a gift or money, something, and it's a nice thing to do. Also spend more time giving kudos than focusing on negative events. So things happen, and we will never have a time without a few negative events occurring, but there are so many positives, and make sure that any little positive you see, you share and recognize that. So, and also really include everyone. So it's, again, I want to really, really focus on saying, it's not just the nurses and the techs, it's everyone. So make sure you're celebrating your front office staff, your physicians, fellows, medical students, anyone that walks into that unit, you should celebrate them, and really showcase employee efforts and projects. So if someone comes up with a great process or has a great idea, make sure everybody knows that. And if someone graduates, make sure everyone knows that, too, with their permission. If someone finishes a class, someone goes to a conference, put a little blurb on your communication board, maybe make a poster and congratulations, but always, always showcase the good work. And bring in cookies, of course. Okay, so team building. So a really great idea, and this is something that could start on Monday. You place a poster on your, in your break room, and you say, on November 3rd, we are all going ziplining. Everyone is welcome. So these are actual activities of my endoscopy unit, and in these photos, there are nurses, there are doctors, there are CRNAs, there are unit station clerks, everyone, and their families, and these were just activities that were posted on the break room door, all welcome, and it really creates a nice bonding experience for staff. So get everyone involved, have unit-based quality projects, even fundraise, there are so many great charities out there, support a family during the holidays, collect food for a food pantry, have a book club. We also had a beach cleanup day, where we had so many people show up, and we just cleaned up a beach, and that was a nice team building thing to do together. Just take a quick look at this, and consider that this is something really important. You're maybe in a procedure room with the same four people for eight to 12 hours, so it's important to team build with them. Okay, so measurement. So there's the Press Ganey Employee Satisfaction Survey, so what the employee is going to do is they're going to rate the leader. They will rate the most important things of their experience over the past year, so once you review those results, you'll see the employee might have been focused on salary, maybe they were focused on how we felt their response was to the pandemic, or how they felt valued. You may say that an employee feels that they don't have enough time to complete their work, so whatever you see as the top three for the following year, you should completely focus on what can I do to address this, and those are the top reasons why your employees feel they need a little bit more from you. Also, you could do some unit-based surveys, monitor the unit culture, pay attention to the body language, how's your attendance on the unit, and then so important, and we mentioned this before, debrief with your unit-based council. Have a lead of that, make sure not everyone's comfortable to come to you as a leader and talk about problems, or maybe they don't think their problem is significant enough, but every meeting your unit-based council has, you want to make sure that you also hear what's going on, you have your own meetings, maybe daily huddles, and find out what's going on on the unit, and if they need, if they have a need, that you absolutely give that feedback, and if it's a problem you cannot solve, then elect members of the team to help you solve that. Okay, so again, you schedule your meetings, you discuss patient experience, employee experience, implement any small workflow changes, and then you track that improvement, and this is also another team-building activity. The very top of this raft is our director of endoscopy, and then I see some CRNAs and some nurses, and actually there is our green champion at the back there. So, okay, so what is the importance of employee experience for patient experience? High levels of employee experience foster a positive environment, and it will enhance the overall patient experience. High levels of employee satisfaction will impact your productivity, your quality of work, the employee's commitment to work, and understanding that patient experience is key towards improving patient-centered care. This allows us to assess the extent to which patients are receiving care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values. And that is it. Thank you.

employee experience

patient care

unit-based councils

employee satisfaction

team-building activities