What is Compassionate Care in Nursing? According to a systematic literature review in 2016 published by the National Center for Biotechnology, “Compassion originates as an empathic response to suffering, as a rational process which pursues patients’ wellbeing, through specific, ethical actions directed at finding a solution to their suffering. We therefore define the term [continue reading…]
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The Value of Interim Nurse Leaders
Maintaining safe, high-quality care and an excellent patient experience are top priorities of every healthcare organization. While leadership stability is widely appreciated as essential to achieving these goals, we are living in a time of the Great Resignation. This begs the question: how does an organization achieve such stability even during times of volatility? Many [continue reading…]
How to Promote Diversity in Nursing Leadership
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have become standard practice in myriad industries and based on results, it’s not hard to imagine why. DEI programs help companies access larger talent pools, improve employee engagement, and bring new perspectives to organizational challenges, among other things. In fact, around 76% of job candidates report that a diverse [continue reading…]
How Kirby Bates’ Nurse Executive Gateway to Knowledge® Accelerates Leadership Competencies
One of the more significant ways to assure the future stability of any healthcare organization is to pass down core leadership competencies to the next generation of healthcare executives. Knowledge transfer, whether through sponsorship and mentorship programs or otherwise, is one of the keys to developing internal talent and assuring the future of the leadership [continue reading…]
Keys to Succession Planning in Healthcare
According to a report from Becker’s Hospital Review, CEO resignations are at an all-time high in 2022, with 520 leaving their posts from January 1 through the end of April — an 18% increase from the same period in 2021. It’s a sign of the times. Leader resignations across the board are skyrocketing, leaving organizations [continue reading…]
Promoting CNO and CFO Synergy Achieves Healthcare Goals
As pressure mounts to improve clinical and operational results, Chief Nursing Officers (CNOs) and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) work together to align the organizational imperatives—both as a provider of quality and safe patient care, and as a fiscally responsible business. Joint accountability through synergistic relationships is required to transcend the organizational stressors inherent in today’s [continue reading…]
Avoiding the Pitfalls: Interview Process For Healthcare Leadership
The success of any healthcare organization starts with the leadership team. This can be particularly complex in times of transition, during which myriad dynamics — relationships, priorities, and structures — are subject to change. The “great resignation” is further shrinking an already-tight market for top-level talent in the healthcare industry, making it all the more [continue reading…]
Why Interim Leadership in Healthcare Is an Advantage
Interim leadership is one of the most valuable tools in any healthcare organization’s proverbial toolbelt, especially amidst the new challenges that the industry faces as a whole. Necessity fosters innovation, and as the pandemic forced the adoption of many new business practices, industry-wide notions regarding interim leadership have shifted dramatically. Before, during and after the [continue reading…]
New Nursing Practices in 2022 That Are Here to Stay
“Necessity is the mother of invention.” -Plato The impact of this age-old proverb is unrivaled in our coronavirus pandemic era. It’s no secret that the last few years have forced innovation into nearly every industry worldwide, and it’s abundantly true for healthcare organizations. Between overloaded hospitals, limited staff, and unprecedented employee burnout, the healthcare [continue reading…]
5 Skills for Children’s Hospital Leadership
It takes a special type of person to be a successful children’s hospital leader. In addition to their clinical expertise, healthcare professionals who specialize in children’s care have a distinct set of interpersonal skills that position them to successfully navigate the particular challenges associated with caring for sick children and their families. 1. Compassion First [continue reading…]
The Difference Between Mentorship and Sponsorship
Mentorship and sponsorship are two concepts that have multiple purposes and vary in their usage. A university mentor could be a professor who helps a promising student find scholarship opportunities, whereas a career mentor could be a coworker who offers advice on ways to grow your career. While sponsorship and mentorship are admittedly similar, [continue reading…]
The Dwindling Healthcare Workforce: Where Do We Go From Here?
“Ask any nursing leader about their greatest challenge and they’ll likely point to staffing. If hospitals weren’t already feeling the effects of a severe nursing shortage, a nationwide rise in hospitalizations fueled by the highly contagious COVID-19 delta variant has made the effects of it unmistakable.” —Erica Carbajal and Gabrielle Masson, Becker’s Hospital Review. [continue reading…]
Compassionate Leadership Practice through Diversity & Inclusion
Jane Fitzsimmons, MSN, RN, Executive Vice President, Executive Search Services Ena Williams, MBA, RN, CENP, Nurse Executive & DEI Researcher Joy Parchment, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, Nurse Executive & AONL Committee on DEI Based on a panel discussion moderated by Bonnie Barnes, FAAN, The DAISY Foundation. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are not something that [continue reading…]
Answering Healthcare’s Call to Recruit a Wider Variety of Roles
The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need for healthcare executive leadership to be more closely aligned across clinical and non-clinical domains. As never before, organizations are seeking the clinical, operational and financial insights of experienced executives to inform recruiting across all C-Suite roles. Because Kirby Bates Associates (KBA) is led and operated exclusively by [continue reading…]
Succession Planning in Healthcare: When to Do it & How to Do it Well
Healthcare leaders and board members alike agree that succession planning is important, but few organizations actually begin the process or do it consistently or efficiently. Many leaders find succession planning daunting, uncomfortable for themselves and they fail to appoint someone to lead the charge. What some healthcare leaders don’t understand is that a failure [continue reading…]
What to Expect When a Long-Term CEO Retires
When a long-term chief executive officer decides to retire or leave a hospital/health system, there is a chance for a huge cultural shift. It not only affects the C-suite, but it spreads to all areas of the hospital. In July of 2018, Becker’s Hospital Review reported 57 health system CEO resignations from the first and [continue reading…]
Emerging Role of the Chief Population Health Officer
By Dennis J. Kain, MHA, FACHE, Senior Vice President Why Hospital Systems Are Now Hiring a New Type of C-Suite Leader The shift from a fee-for-service model to a focus on community wellness, increasingly known as population health, is re-defining healthcare as well as the competencies required of a successful leader. Organizations thriving in this [continue reading…]
Applying 5 Principles of Persuasion to Improve Physician-Patient Engagement
Have you ever thought about how much healthier your patients would be if they just followed their caregivers’ instructions? It’s a frustration that virtually all caregivers feel because the consequences of patients’ non-compliance are very real in terms of morbidity and mortality, not to mention costs. Within the last decade, patients have become active participants [continue reading…]
8 Smart Practices for Fostering Diverse Leadership Advancement
Our nation’s increasingly diverse community will result in a more diverse patient population moving toward a majority-minority balance by 2043, according to projections from the U.S. Census Bureau. Currently, those changing demographics are reflected in hospital patient populations. And yet, this increasing diversity is not reflected in healthcare leadership. How do you retain and develop [continue reading…]
Leading Hospitals Turn to KBA for Progressive Interim Perioperative Leaders
[Download the PDF] As surgeries begin to resume across the country, many organizations face new post COVID-19 challenges such as minimizing the number of staff in the surgical suite and post-anesthesia care units (PACUs) to mitigate patient risk. Healthcare organizations are also working to keep their largest revenue center functioning at peak performance, especially [continue reading…]