2004 OPEN FORUM Abstracts
IMPACT OF AN ANNUAL RETREAT ON PROCESS IMPROVEMENT IN A RESPIRATORY THERAPY SECTION.
Vince Roberts, BS, RRT, Lucy Kester, RRT, MBA, FAARC, James K.
Stoller, MD, MSc, FAARC, The Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Cleveland,
Ohio
Background: In order to fulfill the mission of
providing superb respiratory care, managing respiratory care services
requires communication and collaboration. To enhance communication
and collaboration in our Section of Respiratory Therapy, we
have conducted an annual retreat for the Section since 1996, during
which important challenges and opportunities are discussed in a large
group forum. The current report describes the retreat process and
outcomes.
Methods: The
annual retreat brings together all clinical specialists, supervisors,
and managers in the Section of Respiratory Therapy, along with the
medical director of Respiratory Therapy and representatives of the
staff from each shift. In advance of the annual half-day retreat,
supervisors and clinical specialists are asked to write a brief
description of areas needing improvement and actionable proposed
solutions to these challenges. These documents are reviewed by the
supervisors, managers, education coordinator, and medical director
and a list of discussion topics for the retreat is formulated.
The
actual retreat day begins with a brief introduction and summary of
the year’s activities and then encourages open-ended
discussions regarding these various topics, with the explicit,
repeated goal of generating solutions. Minutes are kept to identify
specific “action items,” a list of which is visited
repeatedly throughout the year to assess progress towards successful
completion of each action item.
Results: Over
the 8 years of annual retreats, 103 action items have been generated,
of which 84% (n=87) have been successfully implemented or completed.
As evidence of the importance of this group-based activity, we cite
several examples of suggestions and action items that were felt to
uniquely represent group process and wisdom and which were not
proposed by individuals, e.g., formation of a committee to develop a
new peer review employee evaluation system, and a new strategy for
documenting completion of annual skills checks.
Conclusions: On
the basis of this experience, we recommend conducting an annual
department retreats in respiratory therapy. We believe that benefits
include collective problem-solving in a public forum to identify
solutions not advanced by individuals. We also believe that direct
communication in such retreats leads to enhanced morale, as suggested
by the very low respiratory therapist turnover rates during the 8
years over which annual retreats have been conducted at the Cleveland
Clinic Foundation.