Hi Team –

 

Happy New Year!! I hope you had a wonderful time with family and friends over the holidays and were able to rest and recharge, so that together, we can usher in a breakthrough calendar year in 2023 that continues to move TriHealth from good to great! Sending a special thanks to the many frontline team members, physicians, nurses, caregivers, and support teams who sacrificed some or all of their holidays to care for our patients. And, a grateful shout out to those who braved the “Blizzard of 2022” in the days leading up to Christmas Day to ensure our patients continued to receive the highest quality care, even during the worst of the snow and freezing cold. 

 

Foundational to our ability to Get Healthcare Right is an engaged workforce of team members, physicians, and volunteers who feel supported and valued, and who work together to fulfill our mission and live our TriHealth Way Values, always. With that in mind, I am excited to share the encouraging results of our most recent TriHealth Engagement Pulse and Culture of Safety Survey, which was completed by nearly 65% of team members and physicians in November. 

 

Many of you have asked me…. Why is engagement important? In the simplest terms, engagement is a measure of the degree to which team members and physicians are personally aligned with, and supportive of, the goals of an organization – AND are actively working together to achieve them. Last year’s March 2022 Pulse Survey results showed dramatic gains in team member and physician engagement and job satisfaction. This was especially encouraging, as we were emerging from the worst of the pandemic at that time and, understandably, many other organizations were experiencing plummeting engagement and team morale. Even more encouraging is the fact that our November 2022 Pulse Survey results indicate we’ve maintained those gains – with strong team member and physician favorability between 83-84% – while also making improvements in other important areas! And while we have opportunity for continued improvement, we are well above healthcare industry engagement benchmarks – which is solid evidence that our team is committed to our work of Getting Healthcare Right, and that our collective efforts in remastering our proven TriHealth Way practices are making a difference!

 

What’s equally rewarding about these results is that they tell us you feel supported and valued here at TriHealth, and are engaged in, and intrinsically motivated by, our work to deliver the best and safest care to our patients and community. Perhaps most encouraging of all, you let us know you feel proud to work here! 

 

You also told us that our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion + Belonging initiatives are paying off, as evidenced by marked improvement in your beliefs that TriHealth “values differences” and “provides equitable career opportunities.” These are key measures of our ability to attract and retain our talented team members and physicians AND foster a culture of belonging for those we serve and those who serve!

 

As part of our Engagement Pulse Survey, we also reassessed our Culture of Safety and saw marked improvement with a favorability score of 76.3%! This is the highest score we’ve ever seen at TriHealth, and it exceeded the national AHRQ (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) benchmark by nearly 10%! This encouraging feedback from you is yet another proof point – on top of a sharp, five-year decline in serious harm events – that our Journey to Zero Harm is having a real and positive impact. And this is all thanks to our collective efforts to adopt and hardwire safe, highly reliable best practices in patient care!

 

These survey results also indicated that you believe we have made marked improvements since our August 2021 Culture of Safety Survey with respect to: staff avoiding repeat safety problems, having adequate support staff, having resources from hospital management, speaking up, and discussing ways to prevent errors.

 

Additionally, we learned that team members and providers feel proud and positive about key aspects of our Culture of Safety Journey, including: consistent use of safety practices, like huddles, reporting mistakes that were caught and could have harmed a patient, speaking up for safety, and catching and correcting errors. A common overall theme from your personal responses was the value of strong team dynamics, which are instrumental in creating a positive culture of safety at the local level.

 

In the coming weeks, your leaders will share your “local” departmental and our larger system survey results and facilitate a conversation with you about improvement priorities moving forward. I encourage you to participate in these conversations, celebrate your team’s progress, and discuss your thoughts about where we have opportunities to do better. As we kick off the new year and celebrate this important feedback, we are even more motivated to continue to listen to and invest in YOU and our TriHealth Way Culture. Working together as ONE Team, TriHealth STRONG, The TriHealth WAY  is our “secret sauce” for Getting Healthcare Right for those we serve and those WHO serve – and we’re just getting started!!

 

So, why is it so important for TriHealth to build and sustain a patient-centered, team member and physician-engaged culture? Well, it’s because we know that when our team members and physicians are engaged and actively supporting our work around early detection, better management of chronic conditions, and delivering more integrated, coordinated and personalized care, it results in better care, better health, and better value for our patients – and that’s what Getting Healthcare Right is all about!! And what better way to start the new calendar year than by hearing directly from our patients about the very real, meaningful and, often life-saving, difference we are making every day, in every interaction, one patient at a time. Click the monitor to the right to watch an inspiring video featuring four actual TriHealth patients telling their powerful stories. And these are just a small sampling of the hundreds of thousands of grateful patients we serve each year as we work to Get Healthcare Right.

 

Although we are in the height of the season for cold, flu, RSV, and COVID transmission, we are encouraged by recent trends. Here at TriHealth, we’ve seen a leveling off in COVID positivity rates over the past two weeks (see COVID graphic on far right for details). This is a far better situation than we found ourselves in last year at this time when we were managing through the fourth and worst wave of the pandemic. We have also begun to see a downward trend in flu cases at TriHealth in recent weeks. Across Hamilton County, the COVID weekly case rate trend, while relatively stable, still remains above the CDC threshold for mandatory masking in clinical areas.

 

As we say goodbye to 2022, I can’t think of a better way to kick off this New Year than with the BEST healthcare team, anywhere! Thank you for everything you do – and I know you will continue to do throughout calendar year 2023 – to help set TriHealth apart as the best and most trusted healthcare system in the Greater Cincinnati region and a national model for Getting Healthcare Right!!