← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Joy White, Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer, Legacy Health Good Samaritan Medical Center
00:07:34
Loading summary
Transcript13 lines
- [00:00]
A
At Insight Global Health, we are dedicated to helping you and improving healthcare for everyone. That means building stronger teams and delivering sustainable solutions that truly make a difference. We offer a full spectrum of talent and technical services and deliver cross industry expertise to bring you innovative best practices to solve the problems that we face in healthcare. We're not just promising you results, we are delivering them. Visit us@insightglobal.com this is Gracelyn Keller with.
- [00:28]
B
The Beckers Healthcare Podcast and we are recording live at the 15th annual meeting. I'm currently joined by Joy White who is the Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer at Legacy Health Good Samaritan Medical Center. So Joy, thanks so much for being here. We'd love to have you start off by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit more about your background in healthcare and your organization.
- [00:48]
C
Awesome. Well, thanks so much. Super delighted to be here. As you stated, My name is Dr. Joy Nicole White. I am the Vice President, Chief Nurse Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center. That's in Portland, Oregon. We're an eight hospital system. We have hospitals and multi state not only in the state of Oregon, but Washington state. We have one children's hospital, Women's and Children's hospital, one behavioral health hospital, Legacy Good Samaritan where I have the pleasure of serving as a 219 bed acute care hospital in the heart of Portland. We see about 32,000 emergency department visits annually and 14,000 surgeries and we are a complex surgical, elective surgical procedure hospital. It's my pleasure to serve there. And again, so happy to be on with you today.
- [01:37]
B
Wonderful. Well, thanks for being here. And let's start off in the past 12 months or so, what's something you've taken on that you're particularly proud of and what impact has it made on your organization?
- [01:47]
C
Yeah, what a great question. So I did mention and answer part two of your first question, which was a little bit about my healthcare background. So I've been in healthcare for 23 years. I am a nurse practitioner by trade, both in women's health and psychiatric mental health. I will tell you, my passion sits somewhere between the intersection of clinical operations, employee well being and development and leadership. And so when I think about one of the things that has been so impactful since joining the Legacy system, I'd have to really lean in on our ability to not just recruit but retain top talent and decrease our contract labor utilization. When I got there, our contract utilization was pretty high. Coming off the heels of COVID And so through some really innovative strategies and Working with our leadership team and hr, we've had the opportunity to launch an open house, which was really amazing, led by the nursing leaders, along with some of our frontline team members. And we just attracted over 90, 90 nurses in the Portland area and some from a little bit further who have decided to make Legacy Good Samaritan their home. And so really excited about that. We saw our contract labor decrease immensely. And I will tell you, creating that sense of belonging where people feel like this is definitely their place. Some of that contract labor actually decided to come on board with us in a full time capacity. And so it's been such a great win. Of course, you know, the financial implications for that. And so seeing that reduced cost of contract labor has been great. And then mentioning belonging, I think that would be the next thing that I talk about. So we launched a campaign called we are Good Sam and that is specifically focused on creating inclusion and diversity and belonging there. And we've just had such a wonderful response to that in terms of our strengthening our teams and our overall engagement among. We have 1,781 employees. And so we've really seen just a beautiful impact of people feeling like, wow, you know, this is home. This is my second place. If I'm not at home, I enjoy being here.
- [04:03]
B
Wonderful. And then kind of on the flip side of that, what do you see as the most significant challenge currently facing health care and how are you working to address it?
- [04:11]
C
Yeah, what a great question. And there's so many, but if I had to pick one, because that's what you asked me, the greatest challenge, you know, I'd have to say the increasing demand for services and the decreasing reimbursement for their services. So we find ourselves as hospital leaders having to do more with higher expectations, with a lot less resources to do it. And so how are we addressing that? I think community partnerships, I think financial containment, doing things, really looking at where we've got redundancies in our system and again, like I said, leaning on our community partners. Who's doing what, where and who does it well, and. And how do we better collaborate? I think working in silos is no longer an option. I think it's no longer an option. So yeah, I'd say increasing demand and decreasing reimbursement.
- [05:06]
B
Absolutely. And I'd love to know what the biggest leadership lesson is that you've either recently learned or are currently learning that you'd like to share.
- [05:14]
C
You know, this is another great question, so thanks so much for asking it. I'd have to say from a Leadership perspective. You know, I talked about this intersection of my passion, so loving clinical operations and just living in that world and in data and data analytics and then, you know, my people so thinking about employee well being and this one really is the third kind of passion of mine, which is leadership and organizational development. And so that lesson for me is team members aren't looking for perfect leaders, they're looking for present leaders. And so a present leader who provides not just vision and clarity, but I think encouragement and authenticity, that's what inspires people. Those are the leaders that people want to follow and those are the leaders that develop leaders, create other leaders. And so I think for me it's trusting the team that's around me, creating the space for them and realizing they don't need me to be perfect.
- [06:09]
B
Absolutely. And then I'd love to touch on workforce as we wrap up our conversation. So workforce challenges do remain the number one priority for many leaders in healthcare. So how are you working to address these challenges within your organization?
- [06:22]
C
Yeah, I think I talked about one of them and that's, you know, I think you've got to recruit the best and the brightest. What does that look like? You've got to stay competitive in your market. And so I think part of that competitiveness and something we're doing now is really leveraging social media and leveraging our platforms and talking about what we do. You know, health care is such a humble profession. You know, people typically don't like to toot their own horn. But I will tell you, with this new generation of health care providers, health care deliverers, caregivers, it's really important looking at social media, they want to see what your organization all about. And social media is one of the first places that they go. And so really working with our marketing team, our HR team, our leaders to highlight those stories. What are we doing? What are we doing? Well, how do we tell that story? How do we capture it and put it on social media? How do we introduce our culture to people who have never walked into our doors, but we're sharing our culture with them through social media. So not being afraid to lean into those platforms and really show people who we are and what we do.
- [07:24]
B
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining me today on the Becker's Healthcare podcast. Again, we are recording live at the 15th annual meeting.
- [07:31]
C
Awesome. Thanks so much for having me.