Health.mil - Feature The MHS as a Learning Organization

Health.mil - Feature The MHS as a Learning Organization

Feature The MHS as a Learning Organization

A true learning organization is committed to continuous, dynamic learning and is invested in its staff; ensuring that they are equipped for change, pursuing excellence and driving innovation and ongoing performance improvement.

 AS the MHS continues its path toward high reliability, the term “learning organization” will become part of our collective lexicon as well as an integral part of our mindset as an enterprise. To fully understand and embrace what this means, let’s take an in-depth look at the learning organization concept and what it means to us as MHS patient safety champions:

The Basics of a Learning Organization –
A true learning organization is committed to continuous, dynamic learning and is invested in its staff; ensuring that they are equipped for change, pursuing excellence and driving innovation and ongoing performance improvement. “A learning organization is:

• Skilled at creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge.
• Skilled at creating collective, coherent action that reflects new knowledge and insights.

In the health care space, manipulating these lessons into manageable and replicable processes represents the ideal “learning health care system; maximizing quality, safety, service and affordability”

The MHS as a Learning Organization and High Reliability –
Because High Reliability Organizations (HROs) nurture an organization-wide culture of continuous learning, the evolution of the MHS as a learning organization will require:

• Building a cadre of clinical experts/leaders in patient safety/quality/process improvement.
• Preparing the entire clinical workforce with the knowledge and skills required to implement safety and quality science at the frontlines of patient care.
• Developing visionary, innovative leaders with the attributes and skills necessary to foster a learning culture.

In a learning organization, there’s a laser sharp focus on gathering, sharing and applying knowledge across all levels of the organization. By applying and leveraging knowledge, both leaders and staff are able to obtain and provide feedback to continually improve and innovate.

The Role of Leaders in a Learning Organization –
Because the success of a learning organization depends on the ability to establish the infrastructure, systems and processes needed to foster continuous learning, the role that leaders play to make this possible is absolutely critical. In fact, there three are key components leaders must display in a learning organization:

• Engagement: Leadership engagement and focus is critical to ensure successful implementation and sustainment of improvements in healthcare quality and patient outcomes.
• Commitment: Leadership commitment to safety as a system-responsibility helps to establish a culture of safety that decreases variability in standard care processes and can improve staff buy-in and compliance.
• Awareness: Involvement of an informed leader is often referred to as the single-most important element of highly-reliable organizations.

Today, by leveraging the high-reliability framework as well as performance improvement initiatives already underway, the MHS has the opportunity to develop and engage high-impact leaders committed to an enterprise-wide approach to achieve superior quality care and patient outcomes for every patient every time. This is of extreme importance as evidence indicates that the key to effective and sustainable transformational change is strong and effective leadership.

Becoming a Learning Organization –
To successfully advance the MHS to becoming a high performing, learning organization, an evidence-based systemic approach has been put into place and includes the steps described below:

• Complete development of workforce patient safety/quality/process improvement (PS/Q/PI) competencies based on roles and responsibilities and the most current evidence, and continue to identify learning resources and develop strategies for addressing gaps.
• Enhance learning in “soft skills” for military treatment facility leadership; skills necessary to lead change such as communication, teamwork and team-building, creating organizational trust, coaching, and mentoring.
• Review existing leadership programs across the Services and the DHA for possible expansion of PS/Q/PI and high reliability training in support of identified leader competencies.
• Leverage strategic partnerships to accelerate MHS evolution to a learning organization.

As detailed above, focused and diligent work is underway to establish and implement a roadmap for an MHS learning organization. For this reason, as we continue to familiarize ourselves with the learning organization concept, it is important to keep in mind why there’s such an emphasis on this effort. To that end, listed below are just some of the results that can be expected when key concepts used by high-functioning learning organizations are implemented successfully:

• Better care and outcomes for our patients.
• Improved collaboration and communication.
• Continuous, enterprise-wide learning.
• Shared vision.
• Support of strategic business goals and objectives.
• Effective and engaged leadership at all levels.
• Culture of improvement dedicated to excellence, innovation, teamwork, and continuous change.

Step by step and team by team, the MHS will continue to make progress toward becoming a highly reliable learning organization. Together we must and we will:

• Start with Leadership.
• Understand how we learn as a system.
• Integrate a blended learning approach.
• Connect to performance expectations.

The journey towards becoming a learning organization is one worth taking and it will ultimately benefit all of us: MHS leadership, staff and most importantly, our patients. To learn more about the HRO framework in the MHS and how it applies to patient safety, click >>here.