Welcome everyone to another Becker's Healthcare podcast.
I'm Ryan Muhammad with Becker's Healthcare.
I'm thrilled to have you have with me today. Christine Young,
chief nursing Officer at Akron Children's. It's so nice to meet you.
How are you today?
I'm doing well, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Of course. Well I am so excited to be speaking with you today. Um,
and to begin,
would you mind please introducing yourself and telling us a bit about your
background?
Sure. Um, I'm Christine Young.
I'm the Chief Nursing Officer at Akron Children's Hospital.
I've been in the role since 2017. Um,
I've been a nurse for almost 30 years.
I started my career as a clinical nurse in a high risk obstetrics unit
and I've been in nursing leadership for over 20 years.
So I came to Akron Children's about 10 years ago. I was, um,
overseeing the neonatal services in the organization and then in
2017, um, was promoted to the chief nursing officer role.
Wonderful. Well, with all that experience,
I know you're gonna have some great answers for us, Jay. Um, so Christine,
would you mind, uh,
jumping us off with a great answer to my first real question? Um,
it's what issues are you spending most of your time on today in your field?
So today is so different than how the rest of my career has gone.
Never have we seen more changes in leadership and especially nursing
leadership than we have during and,
and during this time of the pandemic and kind of emerging from the pandemic.
Um, the two issues that I'm dealing with most of the time, I think,
go hand in hand. One is workforce.
And I don't think that's an unusual thing that for anyone to hear that we're all
dealing with workforce and in healthcare that's especially pertinent.
And then how it impacts the ability, um,
for our patients and family to access services that they need.
So those two really go hand in hand and by me focusing
energy on making sure that we have the workforce that we need to make sure care
is seamless and uninterrupted for our patients and families.
So thinking about recruitment, um, retention,
optimization of throughput for patients,
really focusing on how do we maximize our workforce and keeping them
healthy in order to provide that access for our patients,
which is so very important today. Um,
one of the other things I'm spending a lot of time on,
and I alluded to it a little bit, is workforce health.
It's been a difficult time over the past three years for workers in the
healthcare field and I think paying attention to their, i'll,
I'll say wellbeing and mental health, cuz those are a little bit nuanced to me,
but thinking about how we keep them well and then how we provide the services
they need, should they need them to optimize their mental health as well,
given the difficulties that they're dealing with on a day-to-day basis in their,
in their everyday work.
Yeah, absolutely.
You brought up some great points and kind of thinking about the future,
how are you thinking about investments and growth, um,
in the next two to three years or so?
So I think investing in our people is critical.
So looking at their development and then looking at um,
how do we create pipelines for those with interest in
going to the healthcare care field and how do we make that attractive?
So thinking about how to reach down into the high school students and the
college students earlier and engaging them in conversation about what it is
to be in healthcare and why it's such a wonderful profession and, uh,
how mission driven it is to work in healthcare. So I think investing in people,
um, from a pipeline recruitment perspective and then as well from a retention
perspective, um, thinking about what do healthcare workers nurses need,
how do we achieve that work-life balance and healthy work environment for them?
And then their development, their professional development programs as well.
One that we've I've recently started is a rising nurse leader
program to grow the healthcare leaders of the future. Um,
healthcare leadership has also been difficult over the past three years.
It's always been difficult,
but it really brought to surface a lot of issues over the,
over the past three years with the pandemic.
And I think investing in growing our leaders is incredibly
important. So looking for those high potential, um,
people in the workforce and offering them opportunities to start to develop
those skills before they're in a formal role so that they're ready to go when
those roles do prevent present themselves in um, a way to,
to support succession planning as well. Um,
one of the other things that I always think about when thinking about
investments in the future is digital health.
How do we use technology to leverage that work environment?
How do we really help the healthcare workers
decrease the burden by automation? Um,
we're looking at a virtual nurse program and I know some other organizations
have started testing those,
so we're thinking about how does that work in the pediatric environment.
So really wanting to pilot a virtual nurse program to help support the
caregivers who are at the bedside and giving um,
an opportunity for nurses to work virtually as well. I think that's a big, um,
issue today is a lot of people wanna work remotely. There's some, um,
benefits to that from a work-life balance and how can we find that right
balance, especially in the nursing profession, which is so hands-on,
but there may be able,
we may be able to find some opportunities to be innovative and creative around
that.
And those are the things that we need to look at as when we think about how we
optimize the workforce, um, in the future.
Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. And before I let you go Christine,
the last thing I wanted to ask you is what are you most excited about right now?
Whether that's something you're doing personally or something that's happening
in your field, anything like that?
Yeah, I think, um, we're really on the,
the starting block of how we transform care delivery.
So when we think about healthcare, we all have our roles. So nurses have roles,
physicians have roles, advanced practice providers, therapists,
every single member of the healthcare team.
And I'm really excited about transforming those roles into delivery of
care by a team,
with everyone working to the top of their scope and really that will improve
access for patients as well.
And everyone working together is that healthcare team and I think we are really
on the cusp of transformation around that. Um,
I think it accelerated with the pandemic that we had a note,
we had to do things differently because doing things the way we've always done
them is likely not sustainable into the future.
So that's really exciting cuz there's endless possibilities about what those
models of care could look like and ultimately bene benefiting the patients and
families and supporting those high quality outcomes that we're committed to.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing those final thoughts with me,
Christine. Uh, that is all I have time for you today.
So I wanna thank you again for joining me and this has been a great discussion.
I look forward to connecting with you again soon.
Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.