Centre Stage:

Larry McBride, Corporate Relations Manager Health Care Services with 3M Canada Company & Outgoing QHN Board Member

As part of our new membership benefit package and our ongoing commitment to collaboration, we are giving impassioned improvers within the Network centre stage. We would like to get to know the faces of your organization. If you have a member that should get centre stage, let us know.

“...I think collaboration between healthcare and industry is extremely important for both sectors. All good thinking doesn’t happen in one sector. Great thinking goes on in healthcare and great ideas and great models are developed in business. Why should they not share? There is no doubt in my mind that we can learn from each other.”

I’m Larry McBride. I currently hold the position of Corporate Relations Manager, Health Care Services with 3M Canada Company. I am also an outgoing Board member of the Quality Healthcare Network.

I’ve been with 3M Canada for 36 years and I’ve had the interesting privilege of having 13 different careers within the company. Not 13 different jobs, but 13 different careers. Ten of those didn’t even exist before I got them.

My current job is corporate relations. I represent 3M corporately with senior leaders in healthcare organizations in Canada, many of which are QHN members. We help our customers succeed by applying or developing 3M solutions. But in order to do so, we need to know what their issues are. It is my job to understand our clients’ issues and needs. So part of what I do for 3M is really get to know what is going on in healthcare.

If you look at healthcare in Canada, we don’t have 500 hospitals anymore. We have about 20 major health systems across the country. As a corporation, we really need to know what is happening in these systems; where they are going, what are the trends they are seeing. You can’t always read about these things on the web, you have to be talking to senior leaders to figure out what’s top of mind.

“I’ve found that no matter what aspect that you work in in healthcare, the people that work in the industry just want to do the right thing and it is about patient care at the end of the day. It’s not about the bottom line; it’s about patient care. And that appeals to me.”

At 3M I’ve worked in many different divisions, from business equipment to healthcare. Healthcare is the area that I have enjoyed the most. For six years I was the Director of Corporate Quality and that was interesting, but healthcare has a strong appeal to me personally. I really do think it is an area in which you can make a difference.

“Where does my passion for quality come from? Through the different work experiences that I’ve had, I’ve actually seen how things can work really well in healthcare environments. But I’ve also seen on a personal level, times when they haven’t. So that’s where my passion comes from. I know things can be done in a better way, with better outcomes.”

3M Canada has been involved in the quality healthcare movement for a very long time. This goes back to the early 90’s with Phil Hassen, Ross Baker, Bill MacLeod and Don Berwick, the original thinkers around quality and healthcare, and their early efforts to leverage the learnings from industry into healthcare. That’s how 3M got engaged in the process. We started to share some of our experiences with healthcare. This strategy really did make sense to us as a company because we are a supplier to that market. It helped us understood more clearly what our customers wanted, the issues that they were dealing with and what they were looking for from us.

“When you walk through the system you realize that there aren’t really many processes in healthcare, there are a lot of workarounds. And its heroic interventions by people that make it work.”

Most leaders that you talk to in healthcare want to do the right thing. But they can’t always do the things that they want to do because healthcare is a complex system. It’s complex and there are various stakeholders.

We have seen some improvements in quality, but I also think the system is more complex than it was 20 years ago because of technology and an elderly population. There are new challenges and these are difficult to overcome. What I see is patient safety driving the agenda. But in order to properly do patient safety, you have to have a quality plan in place. It doesn’t just happen magically.

I also see the system moving towards transparency with public reporting and once that happens, patients and their families are going to be much more acutely aware of what is good quality care and what isn’t. And that I think is what’s driving the system.

“At 3M we’ve worked on several dozen projects in hospitals over the last five or six years and the three challenges we continue to struggle with in healthcare, from a root cause perspective is accountability, knowledge and communication."

No one is accountable; no one really owns the processes. And that needs to be established. There is a serious knowledge deficiency in healthcare, whether it’s education or data and information, it is lacking. And finally the communication piece, which is the change management piece, and is the biggest issue of them all. We’ve been talking about it within our own organization for the past 20 years, but that really is still the number one issue. Someone said to me years ago, improvement is not about doing new things in new ways; it is about stopping the old things. Unfortunately that’s really hard to achieve in a complex system.

“There is a great value for suppliers, for the private sector to become engaged in QHN and join the Network. I would think industry would want to take advantage of QHN membership. The possibilities have just been endless for us at 3M.”

My term on the QHN Board ended this November, but 3M’s Chief Financial Officer, Don Ashton, will be taking my place. This will be the third iteration of 3M representation on the Board, so QHN is clearly important to us. The network possibilities are unlimited in terms of meeting people and getting involved in different organizations. While 3M has benefited from being a member of QHN, I believe the Network has profited by having 3M representation on its Board. Being the only industry member on the Board, I think I brought a different perspective to the table. I have marketing and financial expertise as well as innovative ideas around strategy.

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On behalf of the Board of the Quality Healthcare Network, we would like to express our sincerest appreciation for Larry’s time, leadership and commitment to quality. His expertise in communication and marketing and his role as Chair of the QHN Communication Committee has contributed to raising the profile of the Network both provincially and nationally.

Larry is a trained facilitator and a lean six-sigma black belt. In his spare time Larry walks his dog, worries about his daughters and finds new ways to demonstrate his love for his wife.

Centre Stage Index

To view past profiles of impassioned improvers within the Network, click the one that you want to read.

December, 2007, Gordon Milak from Southwest Community Care Access Centre, London, Ontario

January, 2008, Glenna Raymond from Whitby Mental Health Centre, Whitby, Ontario

February, 2008, Michael Heenan from St. Joseph’s Healthcare, Hamilton, Ontario

Spring, 2008, Carol Annett from VHA Home HealthCare, Ontario

Summer, 2008, Ben Chan from Ontario Health Quality Council

Fall, 2008, Lindsay McGee from Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance, Stratford, Ontario

Winter, 2008, Dr. Michael Baker from University Health Network, Toronto, Ontario