Habitual Excellence — Using a Rapid-Cycle Learning System to Tackle Turnover & Attrition [Webinar]

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Presented by two leaders from Duke HomeCare & Hospice:

Cooper Linton, Associate Vice President, Duke HomeCare & Hospice

Janet Burgess, Director Patient Care Services

Mike Radtke, from Value Capture, will also be part of the Q&A

Duke Home Health (DHH) faced a crisis of nursing turnover, even before COVID hit. Staffing retention is a major issue across all of healthcare — please join us for this impactful and practical webinar regardless of where you work within the broader healthcare system — home health or otherwise!

Powered by a system-wide quest for zero harm throughout Duke Health, DHH leaders used this philosophy and accompanying principles to identify root causes, then build rapid-cycle learning into improvement and management systems. Investigation revealed poor staff engagement and excessive work-process burdens, leading to significant negative patient impact, referring-customer dissatisfaction, and financial harms.

To resolve these problems, DHH’s rapid-cycle learning system, rooted in the principle of respect, involved:

  • Understanding of current condition
  • Leadership behavior changes to quickly respond to staff needs, remove barriers, and coach problem-solving
  • Tiered-huddle management system to elicit and escalate problems, especially safety problems, and vitally, ensure psychological safety so frontline staff and managers raise issues
  • The willingness to shed traditional leadership methods, to experiment, iterate and be perpetual learners

So far, RN turnover has been reduced from 75% to 18% (annualized rates).

These lessons are transferrable to many different settings, so please attend if you work outside of home care.

Learning Objectives

This session will provide practical tips on how to design systems that produce:

  • Responsive, supportive, effective leaders
  • Empowered, engaged safe employees
  • Better patient and financial outcomes