Detroit Northwest aims to improve morale, satisfaction

At the Detroit Northwest medical center, they are “Aiming for Excellence.”

It’s all part of an innovative new program designed to turn around morale and satisfaction for patients and employees alike. The twist? The employees, union and non-union, are responsible for designing and making changes.

“With the help of a consultant, we created a democratically elected work team that includes an administrator, a physician, a nurse, a medical assistant, a radiology and lab technician, a rehabilitation therapist, a facilities person, a call center representative, a front desk clinic service representative and a pharmacy assistant, says Joy Calloway, the administrative manager of the System’s center since July 1999.

Since October of 2001, the multifunctional “Aiming for Excellence” work team has met for three hours weekly to talk about the problems at the center from all perspectives. Now they meet monthly to discuss how improvements are progressing.

“Everyone was committed to it,” Calloway says. “We knew we had poor patient satisfaction and low employee morale. And our Parkside scores showed it.”

Calloway says it was critical to the center’s survival that improvements be made, especially with it’s 20-plus physicians and 125 other staff receiving about 90,000 patient visits a year.

Consultant Bill Middlebrooks of the Southfield-based customer service firm, “Excellence in Action,” hinged a substantial portion of his fee on the success of the group and led the employee team in developing a list of the top five goals to improve patient satisfaction and employee morale.

“We needed to make quite a few changes so we set up a satisfaction importance index to see where we should concentrate first,” says Calloway.

As a result of the index, Calloway said the group then determined to focus on the top five areas of concern to patients, with a goal of measuring the center’s successes by the 2002 third quarter Parkside scores. A goal was set to improve patient satisfaction from 75 percent to 80-85 percent in the five areas cited.

The team’s objectives for improving patient satisfaction included: improving telephone access; adding access for same day appointments; reducing waits to see physicians; improving turnaround times to 24hours on prescription refills via the center.

pharmacy; and setting up processes to work with patients on routine requests, like the health forms required by schools.

Improving employee satisfaction was less clearly defined as a process, so the top five goals hinged on: improving procedures; providing resources so that work could be done efficiently; providing increased training and education opportunities; and improving communications between teams; and improving communications in between teams. Employee morale was measured at 2.78 out of 4 on a satisfaction index. The goal was to improve to 3-3.25 out of 4 in the designated areas of improvement.

Fred Garland, a union painter who has spent 27 years at the site and who was an elected member of the center’s work team, says he has been pleased to see the changes.

“When I brought something to the group, changes have happened. I think employees have really responded once they saw that management was serious. It’s really made a difference in morale here. I’d like to see what happened here done across the System.”

“I’ve seen improvements for physicians in three areas,” adds Dr. Silas Cardwell, an internal medicine physician also on the “Aiming for Excellence” work team. “We start early now seeing patients. My team, myself, the nurse and medical assistant, experience no delay, thanks to a new process that makes sure the exam tables are prepped and supplies are on hand. The team also developed a process to make sure more rooms were available per doctor so no bottlenecks were created.”

Cardwell also feels he’s practicing medicine more fully. “We developed a process where I now can make a point of calling back select patients after an office visit, to follow up with them at home, to make sure they are doing well and to answer their questions. That has given me more satisfaction. I feel like I am practicing medicine the way it should be practiced.”

“Without question, everyone in our team is excited about making these changes,” he says.

“All internal efforts to achieve significant gains in patient satisfaction had failed,” says Margaret Dimond, the Detroit regional administrator and the vice president of ambulatory services at Henry Ford Hospital. “The physician staff indicated that intensive work was needed to be done on teamwork and process change. Those are the key ingredients of the program Bill Middlebrooks created. Already we can see and feel the change in staff enthusiasm, patient satisfaction and overall quality of service delivery.”

Adds Dimond, “I believe that Detroit Northwest can be one of our leading centers as a result of the goals outlined in ‘Aiming for Excellence’.”