Welcoming Our New Colleagues and Enrolling them in our Vision

Every two weeks, I spend an hour welcoming our new people at employee orientation. My task at orientation is to begin to enroll our new colleagues in our vision.

I begin explaining who we are by introducing our THREE work systems of Greater Baltimore Medical Center, Gilchrist, and GBMC Health Partners and our very important partners, the 600 or so private practicing physicians who we work with. I then introduce them to our Mission (our purpose of bringing health, healing, and hope to our community) our Values (the behaviors we hold each other accountable to) and our Vision (where we want to go). I tell them that they may not remember our vision statement word for word, but that they should remember our vision phrase: to every patient, every time, we will provide the care we want for our own loved ones. 

I then ask for a volunteer to help me identify what we mean by “the care we want for our own loved ones.” We always arrive at our four aims as the definition of that care: the best Health outcome, and the best Care experience, with the least Waste of resources, and the most Joy for those providing the care. 

I explain that the GBMC HealthCare System is a not-for-profit company and that as such, we are owned by the community. The Board of Directors consists of 27 unpaid community members who oversee GBMC and determine its direction. They wrote the vision statement in the fall of 2010 during a time of turmoil regarding the topic of healthcare reform. The vision statement talks about truly focusing on the patient, coordinating care, and moving upstream to keep patients out of the hospital. This vision statement is the game plan that I, as the Chief Executive Officer, am held accountable to carry out. It is this vision statement that has brought us components like our patient-centered medical homes, the richness of our SAFE program, elder medical care in the home, and our palliative and integrative medicine programs, just to name just a few. I tell them that we have created these things using our core competency of redesigning care.

I explain to them that our business model is a continual improvement and that Lean Daily Management is an important tool to move us faster towards our vision. I show them our leadership system model (left) and explain that their supervisors will demonstrate how the work of their department fits in with our organization-wide strategic objectives.


I thank them for joining us and I encourage them to come forward with new ideas to be tested to help us improve even faster. I wish them a great career with GBMC.

If you would like to see any of this, click here to view a video of this week’s orientation. You don’t need to watch the whole thing, but it should provide a “refresher” on connecting our work to our vision.

It is important that all of us in the GBMC system understand why we do what we do, and we should each be able to connect the purpose of our work to where we are going as an organization. We should also be able to talk about how we are improving towards our vision.

Environmental Services Week 
This week is Environmental Services (EVS) & Housekeeping Week (Sept. 8—14) and I am proud to acknowledge the dedication and professionalism of our EVS staff as we celebrate them.

Cleanliness is everyone’s job at GBMC, but our EVS staff members are the experts in cleaning and work tirelessly to get the job done. They spend countless hours in their vital role of keeping us clean and helping to prevent infections.

There are over 100 EVS associates working around the clock at GBMC in a variety of roles servicing more than 1.2 million square feet of facility. So, please join me in honoring all the men and women of EVS!