How to encourage different departments to participate in orientation

Q: Do you have any advice on how to encourage different departments to participate in physician orientation?

Rosemary Dragon, CPMSM, CPCS, medical staff coordinator of OrthoColorado Hospital/St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado: Yes, one of the ways that we’ve gotten the other clinical departments to be involved is if they’ve had challenges with newly oriented providers. We started by speaking with the leadership from those departments, to first create a dialogue about what we were trying to accomplish with the orientation. We worked together, knowing that we wanted to make sure that the physicians were communicating effectively with the clinical staff, and that they were getting all the resources that they needed.

Of course, in any hospital, there are challenges that happen on the clinical floors, and so we’ve had the nurses share those challenges that they’ve had—either through their managers, or directly to me—so that we were able to work with them to start addressing the challenges through the orientation process.

We were very open and honest with the department leadership about what we were doing, and as they shared that back with their staff, the staff started to become more involved in the process improvements we could make. If you’re able to find out what most of those grievances are, and explain that you may be able to use the orientation process as one of the ways to address some of those grievances, you will find this is one of the keys to orientation development, because the staff feel like they are heard, and they really are heard. It gives them a voice, and they’re able to make meaningful change.

Once we had established that, and the staff understood that this orientation process was not focused entirely on the physician, that it was also focused on what was needed for the department to function well when new doctors started, and to work through some of these challenges that they had already identified, the nurses started to come to me individually. I also went to the departments and spent time asking pointed questions about what challenges staff had faced with new providers. We started to brainstorm about how we could meet those challenges specifically using that orientation process. Once staff felt like they had a part to play in what we were doing, they were thrilled to provide more feedback.

Source: News and Analysis