"Defining Personalized Care: Communicate Effectively" available for completion today

Defining Personalized Care — Elevating Our Culture of Service is a two-year initiative designed to provide service education to help all Medical Center employees improve their ability to deliver personalized care through exceptional service. The second segment of this initiative, Defining Personalized Care: Communicate Effectively, is now available for all employees to complete. All leaders and staff should have received an invitation from C. Wright Pinson, MBA, MD, Deputy Chief Executive Officer and Chief Health System Officer for VUMC, automatically enrolling them in the new segment.

About 80 percent of the VUMC community have completed the first installment, Defining Personalized Care: Be Welcoming. Each segment is designed to be completed in the order they are assigned to employees in the Learning Exchange. Once Be Welcoming (available here) is completed, employees are then able to complete the second segment, Communicate Effectively (available here).

“Communication is at the very core of what we do every day as we interact with our colleagues, patients, their families, and other visitors to the Medical Center,” said Brian Carlson, VUMC Patient Experience Senior Director. “This segment covers some basics of effective communication and provides important reminders about some small things we can all do every day to ensure those we meet know that they are very much valued and appreciated.”

“It’s important to us that this initiative feels different, and celebrates those that already consistently provide exceptional service,” said Cory Colton, VUMC Executive Director of Learning and Development. “We want this initiative to include creative ways to share stories of exceptional service at VUMC, and to leverage those to identify actual behaviors we can emulate to drive consistent, exceptional interactions – every time.”

In Defining Personalized Care: Communicate Effectively (available here), everyone who completes this topic will have a better understanding of the role body language, tone and word choice play in communications, so we are prepared to improve upon our interactions with each other, our patients, and their family members. This segment will take about 15 minutes to complete and includes:

• One Family’s Story, an actual patient story from a VUMC employee that emphasizes the positive role effective communication between VUMC staff and clinicians provided in one family’s journey.
• Communicate Effectively, includes audio examples and drop-and-drag exercises to demonstrate how everyone can improve their communications with patients, families and coworkers.
• A downloadable guide for leaders and team members to help reinforce the key concepts is the last step to successfully mark you as complete for this segment.

Over the next two years, a new segment will roll out about each quarter and each segment needs to be completed in the order they are assigned through the Learning Exchange.

More information about Defining Personalized Care — Elevating Our Culture of Service is available at the Elevate website and the Human Resources website under the Leader Central tab.