Institutional Support

Obtaining Institutional Support

Implementing a successful intervention requires support from your medical center leadership. To obtain support, you will need to clearly explain how your efforts may enhance quality and safety, improve processes and patient satisfaction, and impact on the hospital’s bottom line. A direct communication line to a senior administrative officer related for your effort should be in place before you go any farther, either by a direct reporting structure or by involving a senior administrator on the team. One example of an approach is to have an “executive sponsor” (eg, CEO, CMO, CNO) or administrative champion of the project. This sponsor should receive regular updates on the project (or ideally attend committee meetings) and be an advocate of the project to the hospital leadership. View an example of a letter you may want to send to a possible program champion.

An executive sponsor is invaluable in helping your team focus on critical issues. However, it is equally important that your team understands where it fits in the overall quality improvement structure and priority for your organization. Frequently teams are assembled during a crisis, but need a plan that keeps them connected so that improvements that are made are sustainable and regularly reviewed. It is useful to ask your executive sponsor to whom or what structure your team reports and reviews progress and outlines barriers.

TASK

Meet with members of your administration and have prepared “talking points” and, ideally, some preliminary information you have collected demonstrating the need for their attention to this issue. Case vignettes can illustrate specific issues related to the discharge process and can often be a powerful supplement to data regarding the institution’s rehospitalization rate or rate of post-hospitalization ED visits that supports the need for resources. In addition, these vignettes can highlight the areas that your initiatives are directed at improving and add the “patient’s voice” to your communications.