Centre Stage:
Michael Heenan, Director Quality Planning & Performance Improvement with St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton Ontario
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.
“Here at St. Joseph’s, I get to work with some very bright minds: physician and nurse leaders, professional practice leads and support services. I feel that we are really adding value to their work of improving patient care.”
I’m Michael Heenan. While I’ve had the honor of being with the organization for over five years, I have been the Director of Quality Planning & Performance Improvement with St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton Ontario for fifteen months. Previous to becoming Director, I worked as the Corporate Planning Consultant. My main responsibilities were strategic planning and the implementation of the balanced scorecard.
A year and a half later, my main responsibility now is for the monitoring and evaluation and improvement of quality and performance throughout the organization. I oversee a staff of 11 individuals who work with both clinical programs and corporate leadership bodies. I oversee everything from accreditation, to patient safety initiatives like Safer Healthcare Now!, incident reporting, performance measurement, and any type of clinical planning or business case development.
We have three main campuses. Our main acute care centre in downtown Hamilton. Our ambulatory site is in a bedroom community known as Stoney Creek. And we operate the former psychiatric hospital, which is now the Centre for Mountain Health Services on Hamilton Mountain.
Here at St. Joseph’s, I get to work with some very bright minds: physician and nurse leaders, professional practice leads and support services. I feel that we are really adding value to their work of improving patient care. We are giving these people the ability to implement performance measurement frameworks, strategic planning, accreditation principles and patient safety initiatives.
“While I think it is important for a leader to motivate people and inspire people to achieve, they should also be able to show that he or she is also willing to get into the details and do a lot of the nitty-gritty that you require of everyone else.”
My leadership style is one of both empowerment and delegation. I let people on my team feel like they have the responsibility and the tools to get their job done, but I think it is equally important to lead by example.
While I think it is important for a leader to motivate people and inspire people to achieve, they should also be able to show that he or she is also willing to get into the details and do a lot of the nitty-gritty that you require of everyone else. I am very much someone who is willing to dig down into the trenches and do a lot of detailed work, whether its analyzing data, writing proposals conducting research or making sure we communicate with the right stakeholders. But the bottom line is that I definitely have faith in my staff, in going out there and completing the job that they need to complete.
If my staff wants to try new things or introduce new ideas I support that. If they say, “You know I think there is a better way of doing this,” I support that too. We need to be flexible. I believe that my staff in particular is extremely well educated and trained well on quality improvement. As long as we reach the ultimate goal, I’m happy with the methods by which they employ to do that.
“The ability to mentor, encourage, lead and guide people to work as a team would be what I am most passionate about.”
I would say the number one thing that I am passionate about is team development. While we can hang our hats on many accomplishments, behind that there is a series of people both within the department and across the organization that have been able to work together to get the job done. So the ability to mentor, encourage, lead and guide people to work as a team would be what I am most passionate about.
“There is no such thing as failure, just improvement opportunities…What we learn from our mistakes is just as important as getting it right the first time.”
I think there is a number of good ways to build a good team. One is obviously equipping the team with the right tools, both from a theoretical perspective and an education perspective. But not punishing people for errors is also important. There is no such thing as failure, just improvement opportunities. So if you are able to get everyone on the same page, understanding that we are all rowing in the same direction, and allowing them to go out and do the work they want to do, then I think its easy to create an effective team.
Creating a culture where people are allowed to recognize and report errors is challenging but you are seeing it in patient safety and many of the quality improvement models around incident reporting. No one is perfect. What we learn from our mistakes is just as important as getting it right the first time.
I think here at St. Joseph’s we’ve always had a culture of openness and transparency and working as a team. I think teamwork is inbred in the culture here and the mission the Sister’s of St. Joseph gave us. We’ve always had the ability to lift people up when they need assistance and recognize people when they make great gains.
“Quality of work life and service excellence are two pillars of our recently released strategic plan.”
With regard to recognizing staff achievements, both managers and directors are encouraged to do a number of things at the unit level. But quality of work life and service excellence are two pillars of our recently released strategic plan. So we’ve been doing a number of things around corporate recognition. We have a number of ways of celebrating our accomplishments through both individual and team awards as well as organization-wide recognition events.
“Quality improvement is important because it actually leads to better patient outcomes.”
Our motto in the Quality Planning and Performance Improvement Program is “Moving from Numbers to Knowledge”. We’ve been successful in moving away from debating the data to knowledge transfer. Through our corporate and clinical program scorecards, our discussions now focus on what are we really going to do with the data to improve quality and patient safety at the bedside.
We’ve done a number of things with regard to patient access, expected length of stay and readmission rates in our mental health, urology and general medicine programs. We’ve had great success in employing quality improvement cycles in regard to renal and diabetes patients. And we’ve had some success within the organization on falls management and wait times. We also are beginning to employ QI initiatives in regard to HSMR and mortality, and introduce Physician Performance Reports as part of our medical quality program.
We’ve also been participating in Safer Healthcare Now! and our patient safety experts have seen some great improvements by employing the CCRT Team and the VAP initiative. We are currently involved in the medication reconciliation initiative as well. To date, we’ve seen our VAP rates go down and our CCRT has had success in terms of building a culture of teamwork.
“The number one reason that we joined the Quality Healthcare Network was to access brighter minds across the province.”
We don’t believe we are perfect, and there is a lot of good best practices being done across the country and why not access those minds through the network?
I communicate with QHN members weekly on everything from: “How are you dealing with wait times?,” to “ How are you dealing with accreditation issues?,” to “Are you employing a certain quality improvement tool and what have been your experiences in implementing that?”.
We hope that membership will grant us the ability to learn tools that we can adapt at the front line to improve patient care. Already, I am seeing that in the four to six months that we’ve been a member.
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 CEO of VHA Home HealthCare, Ontario
Summer, 2008, Ben Chan, CEO, Ontario Health Quality Council
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