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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Strengthening Nursing Culture and Workforce Innovation at Touro Infirmary with Quanna Batiste Brown
00:13:32
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- [00:02]
Becker's Healthcare Announcer
The most important healthcare decisions don't happen in isolation. They happen when leaders come together. Becker's 16th annual meeting brings together more than 3,500 hospital and health system executives this April in Chicago. With 800 speakers from Ascension, Cleveland Clinic, Common Spirit, and more, the conversations get real. Leaders will share how they're scenario planning for policy shifts, breaking through value based care barriers and building clinical teams that translate new ideas into real world care care. Join top decision makers in the room April 13th through the 16th. For the agenda and event details, visit BeckersHospitalReview.com and click on the Events tab in the upper right.
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Laura Deardo
This is Laura Deardo with the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. I'm thrilled today to be joined by Quanah Batiste, Vice President of Patient Care Services and Chief Nursing Officer for Touro Infirmary at LCMC Health. Quanah, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
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Quanah Batiste
Wonderful, Laura, thank you for having me. I'm really excited to speak with you today.
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Laura Deardo
Absolutely. And you know, I'm looking forward to learning a little bit more about some of the cool things you've been up to over the last year or so and then how you're thinking about the future. But before we dive in, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and the organization?
- [01:18]
Quanah Batiste
Absolutely. So I'm a New Orleans native and have been a nurse for almost 30 years now. More than 20 of that has been in leadership roles and currently serving at Touro Infirmary as Chief Nursing Officer. Turo is very unique here in New Orleans. It's an 170-year-old community anchor with a really strong legacy in women's services, rehab and comprehensive whole person care. So it's really exciting to be part of LCMC Health System, which is an eight hospital health system, really a newly forming health system within the past years with the commitment to expand our access, advancing quality and ensuring that every patient has a great experience and receives that high reliable care. So, you know, as chief Nursing officer, my role is to strengthen the professional practice of nursing. Really working and focusing on building healthy work environments, aligning clinical operations with our mission. So really looking forward to improving patient outcomes and building an engaged workforce.
- [02:20]
Laura Deardo
I love that. I think that's, you know, such a strong and important mission but definitely not an easy task to do, especially in healthcare these days. And so, and Kimi is first and foremost, can you tell us a little bit more about a project or initiative you led in the last year? What did you do and what were the results?
- [02:37]
Quanah Batiste
Absolutely. The most significant project that I've worked on in the past year is the redesign of our nursing infrastructure, focused on stabilizing nursing operations and rebuilding the healthy practice environment. You know, this included establishing a formal department of nursing education and professional development. With that, we've implemented our LCMC heart ladder so that we have recognition for advanced certification for nurses. Really packing passionate about leadership. So redesigning and realigning our leadership structure to improve that accountability across spans of control was really exciting for me. And then introducing workforce analysis to address turnover, contract labor, focusing on productivity so that we can be operationally efficient. And as a result of that work, we improved our staff's capability, you know, reducing the reliance on overtime and agency labor. And you know, we were really able to see some meaningful gains in engagement and our quality metrics. You know, focusing on that financial stewardship was also something that helped to strengthen our nursing operations team and bring us closer in alignment with our budget and our productivity targets. So, you know, for me over the past year, it's really looking at the quality, you know, understanding and focusing on our workforce well being and, you know, making sure that our leadership team was aligned with fiscal responsibility and advancing care together.
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Laura Deardo
I love that. I think it just really touches on so many aspects of healthcare that are important today, you know, and delivering that quality care and everything else really depends on a great workforce and staff and team working together to make that happen. And so I'm curious, you know, when you look at this transition to bringing in and strengthening your internal pipeline for your workforce and talent development, how do you really do that while keeping an eye on those, you know, operational benchmarks and things that you need in order to improve productivity while also keeping it a great place to work and understanding well being and, you know, avoiding burnout and all those kinds of things. What are some of the ways that you've been able to kind of inject more of that performance culture in without, you know, pushing some of your great team members to become more stressed out by some of these transformations and changes that every organization, quite frankly, has had to make.
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Quanah Batiste
Yeah, absolutely. No balance is everything. And you know, focusing on that workforce resilience and retention, we've done something pretty innovative. And it's looking at incivility and the experience of not only the patient experience, but the experience of the staff. So we're going through right now with our leadership team some work that's focused on incivility, looking at the impact of incivility and how do we build a culture of compassionate care within our leadership team that is really focused on giving the Leaders the tools that they need in order to better address things that happen in the workplace that we may have gone in oversight as sort of the pink elephant in the room. So, you know, we're really focused and honing in on, you know, eliminating that incivility and burnout, you know, because we do have a heavy focus in women's services. You know, we have just hired in a new senior director for women's services, so looking towards promoting that maternal health excellence, you know, advancing our national quality metrics, safety and equity, and then, you know, hoping to have balanced staffing models that will ensure we have operational liability. So we do have a virtual nursing platform here. So those are the things that we are leveraging in order to, you know, work through the change culture and, you know, focus in on working through not having that burnout.
- [06:18]
Laura Deardo
That makes a lot of sense. And, you know, it is really helpful to understand and get inside some of the ways that you're looking at, you know, making these changes in building a culture and addressing that incivility as well. Now, looking ahead, how are you thinking about some of your big priorities and headwinds for 2026?
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Quanah Batiste
Absolutely. So those headwinds, you know, looking at the national workforce shortage, you know, developing a pipeline and strengthening the pipeline, it really starts with, you know, the foundational approach of ensuring that our education teams are ready to accept those new grads, but then creating the environment that they're. That they're really willing to stay within that first year. So it's really having that discipline prioritization, you know, having those regional partners, partnering with different universities across the region, where we can ensure that we're having those conversations. You know, we have new graduates coming in all the time, sitting down with them, having lunch with them, understanding what it is that they see that they would need to make us an employer of choice, and then also investing in that innovative care model, like I mentioned earlier, virtual nursing, ensuring that we have ways to support the staff. You know, we can add, you know, additional nurses as much as we would like to, so using virtual options and, you know, understanding how we could leverage technology in order to make those things better. We're currently looking at AI, so ambient listening, specifically in our home health team. So we've implemented that with our EMR in home health, and we've already leveraged and been able to see wins with decreasing the documentation burden on the nurses who are working in that environment. So I think it's really addressing the headwinds of workforce shortage through digital transformation.
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Laura Deardo
Absolutely. I love that. I Think having that technology and now more than ever being able to be interconnected, have more information at our fingertips, and figure out how you can leverage AI smartly to augment the team that you have there and make their jobs easier, more streamlined, as well as more personable as they're working with the patients. It seems to make a lot of sense when you're thinking about the technologies you mentioned, having the discipline priority and what you're selecting to incorporate into the health system. And once you make those decisions, how do you ensure that you're getting the value from that investment, as well as your teams are adopting it at the rate they need to in order for it to really have that beneficial impact you're looking for?
- [08:42]
Quanah Batiste
Absolutely. So it's really about establishing those KPIs early on, so understanding what those key performance indicators will be and measuring them and then based on that measurement, you know, having that routine, structured measurement. So when there is something that we didn't predict that we're able to course correct, we've done that with our virtual nursing that we have inpatient. We saw an opportunity. We were able to leverage those virtual nurses and have them support admissions as well as discharges, so that we're able, able to improve our throughput. So I think it's, you know, looking at what the KPIs are, reading them, and then understanding what the data is telling us to be able to make better decisions forward.
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Laura Deardo
That's helpful to understand and, you know, really important aspect of building that smart workforce of the future. Now, what do you think the hardest thing you'll have to do in the
- [09:29]
Quanah Batiste
coming year will be in the coming year? The hardest thing that I foresee is culture change, you know, and maintaining that culture change at a pace where you're also maintaining the trust. Health systems are being asked to do rapid transformation, and yet caregivers need stability and psychological safety. So the way that we balance that is being responsible, looking to hold high standards without losing that human connection. The way that I do that is in listening sessions, I have quality time with Quanah, and in quality time with Quanah, it's an opportunity for me to, to sit with the staff, an unscripted time to meet on a monthly basis just to hear about the impacts of the change and make sure that we're hearing it. It's through leveraging shared governance, making sure that we have frontline staff and the leadership staff and interprofessional colleagues working towards a better turo. And the way that we do that is hearing everyone's voice so it's, you know, it's really hard to do cultural culture change, but I think that when you have the folks around you participating in that change is more likely to be sustained.
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Laura Deardo
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And, you know, I love that idea of quality time with Quanah. You know, how candid do people get in those conversations? And what, if anything, have you found kind of surprising about that type of forum?
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Quanah Batiste
What I found surprising is that just having the forum, people feel safe. Right. And usually the things that come up, it's like we don't have anything to say until something happens and then everyone has something to say. So I think for me, what was surprising to me is just that this most recent meeting, speaking with the staff and then talking and throwing out ideas about how to improve a process. Most recently, we were talking about nurse residency and how I can better connect with the nurse residents. And I had thrown out the idea of a champion award for nurse residents, and it was well received. But I think had I not yet had the quality time with Quanah, I wouldn't have had an opportunity to connect with the nurse nurses who connect to the residents to get that synergy. So, you know, what I've recognized is that I have to be available and open to hear. But it's not always that you get the messages that you were expecting.
- [11:46]
Laura Deardo
I can imagine you get a variety of things that haven't come across your desk through these types of forums and others, which is really cool to have that relationship with your team, that they have comfort in doing that and being able to make improvements in that space. So I love that. Now, before we wrap up here, I wanted to ask you about growth, too. Where do you see some of the best opportunities for organizational growth in the future?
- [12:09]
Quanah Batiste
Yeah, for us here at Turo, you know, we're focusing on women and family services, you know, looking at our women's service line to see what can we do to expand and to reach more patients. Our rehab department is really growing. Just yesterday, we opened another seven beds, which is no small feat. So we're able to care for more patients in real time. And then also focusing on the academic workforce partnership. We have here, Warren Eastern High School, where we're starting just this month bringing in the PCT program. So these will be 12th graders that are in a PCT program at high school, and they're going to come and do their externship hours here. So it's really looking creatively for where the best opportunities for organizational growth would be and then leveraging those if they're not created internally, then looking at our external partners to make that happen.
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Laura Deardo
Oh, fantastic. You know, and it seems like really then you're not only investing in the organization, but the community as well.
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Quanah Batiste
Absolutely. Yes. It's all about the community.
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Laura Deardo
Awesome. Well, Quanah, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. This has been a really fun conversation. I can tell how passionate you are about what you do in the patients that you serve. And, you know, I'm looking forward to continuing on this conversation and working with you again in the future.
- [13:22]
Quanah Batiste
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Laura, for your time. I really enjoyed spending time with you and with Beckers and sharing what we're doing here over two row.