Welcome everyone to the Becker Health care podcast
series. I'm am Mariah Muhammad, writer and moderator
with Becker Healthcare care, and I'm thrilled to
have with me today Karen Utah, Senior Director
of the professional practice, quality and regulatory Department
of Nursing at the uma Mass Memorial Medical
Center. Karen is very nice to have you
on the podcast today, to get a started
would you mind, please introducing yourself and telling
us a bit about your background.
Absolutely. And thank you so much, Mariah for
this opportune,
I am Karen Utah, and in my senior
director role here at the Medical Center.
I have the opportunity to collaborate with many
nurses and inter professional colleagues to really drive
exceptional practice. And just to give you a
little background on my journey, I have had
the fortune to spend my entire career here
at uma Mas Memorial Medical Center. I actually
started as a a Pc here many moons
ago and have worked my way up and
reinvented myself. And I think that's really what
the joy of nursing is all about is
that, you know, you grow and learn and
have that commitment to life, long learning. So
I was at the bedside as a critical
care and acute care nurse and then had
an inkling that education was my passion and
went to,
get my masters with a focus in advanced
practice
education and worked in
development for a number of years, became director
of that
department. And then during the pandemic, there was
this role became available, and I was tapped
to lead this work. So for the last
4 years, I've been working as the senior
director.
Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you so much for giving
us that that background on your experience. So
was everything going on nowadays
in everything that you're doing within the organization,
what are are the biggest issues you're following
health care in... For this year?
Great question. So the greatest things that I'm
following right now is really around caregiver engagement,
and how that links to patient, safety and
quality,
and really,
leadership development because I think they're leaders
if they're developed and have the tools and
sources, they can really foster that caregiver engagement,
which really ultimately drives quality and patient safety.
So Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for giving
us that insight. Is there anything that you
are excited about or anything that is making
you nervous in regards to what you're seeing
on the news, anything you're hearing within health
care or anything that you're working on?
Absolutely. So I think when I'm most is...
Excited about is really the innovation and
collaboration that I see. Really across health systems
and our national organizations such as, you know,
the American, you know,
organization of nurse leaders,
the association of nurses and national development and
really seeing academic medical centers coming together to
really share
best practices,
so that others can learn and just not
have groundhog day when we're doing the same
things over and over again. I would say
what makes me the most nervous
is really the complexities of health care.
Patients are sicker than they've ever been before.
And so really
driving our delivery model of care to address
those needs is really
concerning. I also worry about the resiliency of
what I they call human capital.
I think that is 1 of our most
precious resources is our caregivers,
and it's
because of the complexity, it is really challenging
out there on the units.
And lastly, I would say,
the production pressure and the peace,
really thinking about capacity constraints. You know, it's
not uncommon for us to have many borders
in our emergency departments, and we are using
care spaces that I never thought in my
career, we would, you know, have patients boarding
in. And so when I think about the
work that I do around professional practice and,
you know, our residency program, really, how do
we
give our caregivers,
you know, the tools that they need to
address that pace
because it is exhausting.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And Karen, thank you so
much for explaining that Before I let you
go The last thing I want to ask
you, what was the most effective health leaders
need in order to be successful in the
next 2 to 3 years that you think?
Yep. That's a great question. I think the
first
foundation and really sort of the vision would
be that they have a commitment to developing
a healthy work culture. Right? I think that
is really
needs to be celebrated
and really worked on. Really, the first step
in that is really fostering
relationships with caregivers
because that trust
that comes from that relationship is really the
foundation of psychological safety,
which is paramount to really promote patient safety
for everyone. I think the second is really
shared decision making. Right? That is a really
important strategy to empower our frontline caregivers
to address and input when there's ethical concerns
that are going on or they have a
clinical practice challenge. And then, lastly, I'm a
big fan of, proactive
transformation, rather than reactive
transformation. So thinking about,
we are opening a new building to address
our capacity needs and really, an example of
it is that we are going to over
hire. Right, For our summer cohort to address
our hiring needs so that we have
you know, the most precious human capital to
care for our patients. So rather than waiting
and realizing that we need to hire expensive
contract labor,
you know, we're doing,
our recruitment strategies now even though the building's
is not opening till January.
I'm most excited about the evolution of our
new Grad residency program that we have here
at the medical center that was created back
in 2007,
and
because of the commitment of our leadership
team here over the years.
We have really
successfully seen that through national accreditation through the
Pt tap program.
And have 1 of the strongest retention rates
that we've, you know, ever had and is
compared to, you know, our national average. So
here at the medical center our 1 year
retention rate hover between 90 and 95 percent
in comparison to the national average, which is
hovering around 70
turnover with at the 1 year, Mark, and
really,
the commitment of our organization to
you know, fund and support this program. We
know that new grads need
support as they transition to practice.
And that has been validated in many periodic
and evidence based practice.
And so this program
really gives the new novice nurses, the
support that they need to safely
transition to practice this. It's a 1 year
program.
And what our new grads tell us is
that they can't imagine transitioning from academia without
this program.
Got it. Got it. Thank you so much
for sharing those final thoughts Karen. This has
definitely been in informative discussion. So, again, I
wanna thank you so much for coming on
Becker Health care. When I look forward to
connecting with you again soon.
Alright. Thank you so much.