This is a crosspost from LMPartnership.org by John August, Executive Director of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions.
Unions that are seeking to transform the role of frontline workers in health care organizations know that real change will take more than a high level of employee engagement. It will also take a different type of relationship between managers, physicians and workers. Real, sustainable change will require union members, managers and physicians to commit themselves to a social dialogue that creates more value for the patients and communities we serve.
This past week, the president of the United States announced a new partnership. Here’s a summary from healthcare.gov:
Doctors, nurses and other health care providers in America work incredibly hard to deliver the best care possible to their patients. Unfortunately, an alarming number of patients are harmed by medical mistakes in the health care system and far too many die prematurely as a result.
The Obama Administration has launched the Partnership for Patients: Better Care, Lower Costs, a new public-private partnership that will help improve the quality, safety, and affordability of health care for all Americans. The Partnership for Patients brings together leaders of major hospitals, employers, physicians, nurses, and patient advocates along with state and federal governments in a shared effort to make hospital care safer, more reliable, and less costly.
The two goals of this new partnership are to:
•Keep patients from getting injured or sicker. By the end of 2013, preventable hospital-acquired conditions would decrease by 40percent compared to 2010. Achieving this goal would mean approximately 1.8 million fewer injuries to patients with more than 60,000 lives saved over three years.
•Help patients heal without complication. By the end of 2013, preventable complications during a transition from one care setting to another would be decreased so that all hospital readmissions would be reduced by 20percent compared to 2010. Achieving this goal would mean more than 1.6 million patients would recover from illness without suffering a preventable complication requiring re-hospitalization within 30 days of discharge.
This effort will save lives, prevent injuries and can save up to $35 billion dollars across the health care system, including up to $10 billion in Medicare savings, over the next three years. Over the next 10 years, it could reduce costs to Medicare by about $50 billion and result in billions more in Medicaid savings.
The initiative is part of the new health care reform law and represents the kind of challenge that the Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership and our unit-based teams (jointly led teams that operate within each department) are uniquely positioned to take on. And as we do, we also advance the new workplace relationships that can serve as a model for others in this country.
We can show the American people that successful practices in patient safety are an important contribution to deficit reduction. We can show that a new dialogue in the workplace, based on outcomes for the benefit of the community, is essential to our country’s future. The relationship of this outcome-oriented approach to labor-management relations has enormous possibility.
The ongoing debates about deficit reduction, taxes and the protection of essential services to our people must continue.
But the possibilities for frontline strategies for performance improvement are endless – not just in health care, but in many other sectors of an economy that must be rebuilt if we are to ensure good and sustainable employment for the tens of millions of people in this country who want to work.
Frontline workers can show the policymakers the way to rebuild our nation.
In the coming months, you will be hearing more about how our Labor Management Partnership, through unit-based teams, is advancing patient safety as part of our improvement efforts at Kaiser Permanente and within the context of the president’s call to action.
As we put forward this new model of partnership, we will be acting on our Union Coalition legacy statement: that unionized workers help create the means for affordable universal health care. We’ll embolden the instincts of most Americans who believe in the essential role of collective bargaining and union. And we’ll show the unions’ role in delivering better outcomes for everyone in our society.
