Achieving Staff Stability
/Achieving Staff Stability: Using Data-Driven Decisions to Re-Examine Industry Norms
A Unique Collaboration of Better Jobs Better Care-Vermont and Birchwood Terrace Healthcare, with B&F Consulting, Inc., and Quality Partners of Rhode Island
By: Cathie Brady & Barbara Frank
(Working with David Farrell)
March 2007
“The first step is that you have to be big enough to say what you’re doing isn’t working. Then you can fix it, do it better, and move forward.”
Unwittingly, many fiscal and management practices used to deal with chronic staffing instability actually contribute to, and accelerate it. This is the story of how one nursing home, Birchwood Terrace Healthcare, broke with convention, re-examined industry-wide norms, and changed its fiscal and managerial practices. It is also the story of an analytic process that guided Birchwood’s examination, and led it to positive results.
The home used classic process improvement to make data-driven decisions. Using a tool that B&F Consulting developed with David Farrell, Birchwood saw how its fiscal incentives were creating instability. Leadership anaylzed the data, and put new fiscal practices in place that had an immediate impact in stabilizing staffing.
At the same time, Birchwood’s managers focused on strengthening supervisory and management practices, and putting systems in place to solidify relationships among staff. By re-focusing its fiscal and Human Resources, Birchwood broke its vicious cycle of turnover and stress, and achieved workplace stability and harmony. The intervention at Birchwood provides a valuable and replicable example of an analytic process that workplace leaders can use to identify and address underlying causes of staff instability. While Birchwood’s situation has its own unique characteristics, and the tools were customized to Birchwood, the lessons and methods can be applied universally.
The take-home lesson of this case study is that our systems create our outcomes. What we do, gets us what we get. To get something different, we have to do something different. To do differently, we need to see with new eyes what we’ve taken as givens. At Birchwood, when systematic analysis provided new eyes, the nursing home replaced systems that contributed to instability, with systems that helped them stabilize their staff. Their story is a story of change that transforms our field.