Revising our Mission Statement to Make our Purpose Clearer

We formally launched our new mission statement this week. The reason we have a mission statement is to make the purpose of the organization clear to all — it lets everyone know why we exist.

The mission statement of GBMC, since its inception in 1965, has been to provide medical care and service of the highest quality to each patient leading to health, healing and hope. Over the past few years, leaders in our organization have come to me suggesting that this was inadequate because it was clear to them that we also exist to teach future generations of clinicians. GBMC has hosted residency training programs for physicians and trained nurses and many other clinicians. During visits from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) we were asked why education was not formally in our mission statement.

So, in September of last year, the GBMC HealthCare Board voted unanimously to change the mission statement to: The mission of GBMC is to provide medical care and service of the highest quality to each patient and to educate the next generation of clinicians, leading to health, healing and hope for the community. This change makes it clear to our people and to the members of the community we serve, that we are a teaching and learning organization. We believe in following evidence-based medicine and teaching this to new practitioners. It is in seeking new knowledge that we push the science of care forward.

Please share your thoughts and thanks for celebrating this change with us. Here is a two-minute video that explains more.

Moving Towards a Lean Management System
GBMC has been very successful with its use of Lean Daily Management (LDM) to create a company of focused problem solvers and to narrow the gap between the “front office” and the “front line.” We have used this technique for seven years and have seen significant improvement in each of our four aims.

Under the direction of Rhonda Wyskiel, Director of Performance Improvement, a team has been working on the next iteration of LDM, to systematically use lean tools to drive all the work of our leaders. The team first began working on Units 45 and 46 and they have now expanded some of the work to the other medicine inpatient units. They are intent on driving out non-value-added tasks in these units to improve clinical outcomes and the care experience while making it easier for staff to get the job done. This helps to increase the joy in their work of patient care. Staff on the medicine units are working to improve purposeful rounding, a practice that creates standard work in assuring that inpatients are visited at regular intervals and that all their needs are being met.

Our transporters are also working with their nursing colleagues in the emergency department and the medical intensive care unit to maximize the probability that patients move from the emergency department to an inpatient unit expeditiously and with everything that they need. We are already seeing improvement in patient flow and our patient engagement scores. Let me thank all involved in this great work under our core competency of redesigning care!