Northwell Health: Establishing a Culture of C.A.R.E.

Sven Gierlinger | Chief Experience Officer, Northwell Health
Agnes Barden, DNP, RN | VP, Patient & Customer Experience, Northwell Health

This session will describe our journey on creating a culture of C.A.R.E. framework and our educational training program across an organization of 21 hospitals, 450 physician practices, and 61,000 employees. We will discuss our strategy and processes built around our Office of Patient and Customer Experience (OPCE) four main pillars of culture, process, environment and accountability.

Our organizational senior leaders had a ” call to action” to all leaders within our organization to improve our patient and family experience. We collaborated with our HR partners to infuse employee engagement into patient experience strategies and execution.

This collaboration began with enhancing our organization’s behavioral expectations enlisting the voice of our employees. We created an executive leader curriculum. This engaging course served as the gateway to enlist leadership buy-in on our cultural transformation. We developed our Culture of C.A.R.E. course that focused on four main segments: Connectedness, Awareness, Respect and Empathy course, our behavioral communication and service recovery models. OPCE leadership partnered with site leadership in the selection of a culture leader role at each site/service line to lead and sustain this transformation. Each site/service line also selected facilitators to assist in the deployment of the education.

We created a training protocol and certification process. OPCE established a monthly culture leader council where leaders are mentored and share best practice across our organization We have seen marked improvement in our employee engagement data and patient experience metrics. In addition, we successfully integrated our new name change and branding efforts.