For the Learning Executive Blog Q&A series, we’re asking senior leaders: What about your work keeps you up at night? or What makes you get out of the bed in the morning—and excited to start work? This month, Evelyn Campos Diaz discusses the excitement of fostering a culture of continuous learning.
Evelyn Campos Diaz is the lead person in charge of all human resources, organizational learning and research, and occupational health for MedStar St. Mary’s Hospital. It is one of 10 hospitals in the MedStar Health system. As the director, she is responsible for all associate (MedStar St. Mary’s employees are called associates) issues from soup to nuts and everything in between. What she loves the most about her job is the learning and teaching aspects. She loves to see the light bulb go off for associates when they learn a new skill and then pass it on by teaching it to others. She has fostered a culture of continuous and infectious learning by developing learning communities within the hospital.
Q: What keeps you up at night?
The frequency and pace of change that confronts the health care industry. For example, there are numerous regulatory bodies that issues rules, certify hospitals, and track quality metrics. Each of these bodies covers a different regimen at the hospital. As healthcare grows, so do the number of regulations and metrics, and each body could have different requirements. Here’s an example of the granularity of learning that must be delivered to our nurses.
So a floor nurse who opens a medication for a patient must label any remaining medication as to the “use by date.” However different medications, governed by different bodies, have different “use by dates.” Some may be 20 days, some 28 days, and so on. It is a challenge not only to keep up with the correct number of days required for each medication’s “use by” date, but also challenging to train all associates in these requirements, and then to track the associates’ and the hospital’s compliance.
A second concern is career development and succession planning for the healthcare workforce. Luckily, MedStar St. Mary’s has not experienced a dire labor shortage as so many institutions have. They are lucky to be located close to a naval base that provides a ready supply of health care workers and the hospital partners with a high schools and the local community college with a nursing curriculum which provides an excellent applicant stream.
However, once they are on board, keeping them up to date in their skills is the challenge. As well, the nurses want to grow in their career and providing career development, specialty knowledge and management/leadership training is a challenge. The scheduling of training around their patient care duties is difficult. And the skills required for a supervisory nurse are much different than for a bedside nurse. So, evaluating their competencies, potential, and suitability are key to a robust succession planning process that moves them along in their career and MedStar St. Mary’s is committed to “growing their own.”
A third issue causing wakeful nights is the emotional intelligence and resilience required by all hospital staff. They must be able to respond not only to cultural and generational differences, but to the physical and emotional traumas people are experiencing. It requires continual coaching, monitoring, and reinforcement so associates are always “on top of their game.”
While these concerns may be daunting challenges, they actually are what get me excited to get up and go to work each day. I like the fast pace of change and the variety of challenges, and I love interacting with evening/night shift and day shift employees as they transition shifts. I arrive at work by 6:00 a.m. so I can interact with both shifts of workers to find out how things went overnight and to discuss their concerns.
Basically, I love the “human” part of human resources and I know nearly every one of the hospital’s 1200 associates. I just thrive on seeing them make a difference with patients.
Q: What’s your next challenge?
One of the initiatives that I spearheaded was to transition online learning management systems (LMS) so that associates can better guide and develop their own learning. Employees are able to share their own content for their specialty area and publish their content to the LMS. This has made the hospital a learning environment/organization and instilled an innovative and continuous process improvement culture.
In the future, I plan to keep working on having bench strength ready and knowledge transfer mechanisms in place as experienced employees retire so they leave a legacy for the younger generation to follow.
We wish her the best of luck!
