University UBT Fair: this Wednesday, April 23
Please join us for lunch at the 3rd Annual UBT Fairs!
Beginning this Wednesday, the Labor Management Partnership Office, together with the SHARE union, will be hosting the 3rd Annual UBT (Unit-Based Team) Fairs!
These drop-in events are open to all caregivers.
Come grab lunch provided by SHARE, enter a raffle, and see how your fellow caregivers have improved their own work through the UBT projects they designed and implemented.
2025 UBT Fair Locations
University campus: Wednesday, April 23rd 11:30-1:30 in the Faculty Conference Room in the Medical School
Hahnemann campus: Wednesday, May 7th 12:00-1:00 in the Hallway leading to the Cafeteria
Memorial campus: Thursday, May 22nd 11:30-1:30 in Knowles Hall in the Jaquith Building
Featuring: Lunch, raffles, SHARE and other organizational leaders, friends, and fun!
Sponsored by the Labor Management Partnership Office & the SHARE union.
Please feel free to reach out to alaina.anderson@umassmemorial.org with any questions!
click the above or below poster for a printer-friendly version to post in your department
Unit Based Teams Newsletter, Winter 2025
2024 IHI Conference Presentation: Unit Based Teams
Ever wonder exactly what’s getting said outside our hospital about the work you do? Continuous Improvement Coach Will Erickson had the following to say to healthcare leaders from around the country in a talk that he gave at the recent Institute of Healthcare Improvement Conference in Orlando, Florida . . .
IHI 12/10/24
Will Erickson presenting at IHI in his trademark red sweater. To see the slides from his presentation, [[[click here]]]
I’m Will Erickson, I work as an organizer and continuous improvement coach with the Labor Management Partnership Office at UMass Memorial Health in Worcester, MA. I’ve attended the Forum several times over the years but this is my first time presenting, and I’m so grateful that my friends Amar and Becka invited me to join them.
Ok, so now I’m going to tell you about how we’re improving how people feel about coming to work every day through our Unit Based Team program at UMass Memorial, in partnership with our largest union.
First, a little bit about our system: we’re a mid-size academic medical center and safety net with a bunch of community hospitals and practices in Central Mass. We’re the largest provider and largest employer in our region, so the quality of our jobs, and our care, really matters to our community. Unless I’m misjudging this audience, I’ll bet a lot of you work in places like this one.
To understand this story you also need to know about the SHARE union, which makes up the other half of our labor management partnership. It’s the largest union because it represents a lot of different job titles, like nursing assistants, medical assistants, rad techs, respiratory therapists and billers. We organized our union around the values of solidarity and voice: taking good care of each other and being able to participate in decisions about what happened to us. I say us because I come out of this union as an organizer. The lead organizer of that union, Janet Wilder, is in the audience this morning.
Coming into 2016, SHARE leaders had achieved a lot in terms of making their jobs better, but they felt that they hadn’t made a lot of progress making these jobs feel better – in a lot of ways, the work felt harder and more draining than it had. Together with UMass Memorial, we found ourselves facing a shared set of problems; a disengaged workforce that resisted changes they perceived as being done to them – no one wants to feel process improved. We suffered from unreliable processes and variable outcomes, pretty bad patient experience scores, and strained labor relations. And that’s a picture of a much younger me manning an informational picket line in front of one of our hospitals, just to prove my labor bonafides.
We looked around for alternatives, and found the Kaiser Permanente Labor Management Partnership, which is still in place today and the most important labor management partnership in place in US healthcare right now, maybe in any industry in the US. With support from Kaiser and its unions, from our own hospital’s leadership which was a couple years into a Lean journey, and drawing inspiration from a couple trips to the IHI Forum, we did something brave and formed our own labor management partnership, one that was built on those central pillars of voice and solidarity, participation and mutual respect and support.
Following the lead of our friends at Kaiser, our Unit Based Teams are built on the foundation of this labor management partnership. These are department-level process improvement teams create to help us establish a more invigorating work culture, to make labor management partnership an actual, real thing at the frontline between staff and their managers and not just for the leaders at the top. This is our effort to organize a bottom up social movement for safer, smoother, better processes.
This is a picture of one of our UBT Fairs from last Spring, when we got several hundred of people together to share out posters of their favorite improvement project from the last year. One of the great things about rooting our movement for process improvement in the labor movement is that in the labor movement its still cool to belt out songs together, its one of our proudest traditions. So at these UBT Fairs we actually pass out adapted lyrics to pop songs and get several hundred people to sing together about their love for process improvement.
We now have 70 or so UBTs working on projects to reduce falls, to improve patient experience, to reduce no shows, to improve copay collection, to improve throughput. But the UBTs don’t exist for the purpose of solving those problems. The primary purpose of a UBT is to change how our caregivers feel about coming to work everyday. But the big theory of change that animates this whole program for us is that the best way to change how our people feel about their work isn’t pizza parties, or ropes courses, or trust falls, or meditation apps (we’re not against those things) but to involve our frontline people in identifying and then working to solve the process issues that are driving them the most bananas.
Each UBT has a committee of staff, providers and managers. Each is co-led by a labor co-lead and a management co-lead, and each team, in addition to having an improvement coach like me, is co-sponsored by a union leader and a management leader, usually the manager’s boss.
Most of our UBTs meet for 30 minutes every other week, and each works on 2-3 projects at a time. We encourage them to work on big issues, but to scope their project such that it can be completed in less than 100 days – I think that 100 day rule is one we brought back from one of these forums. The co-leads facilitate the meetings and prep for those meetings together beforehand. Our co-leads are really the axle around which the UBT turns, so we give them lots of training and support – we view UBTs as a vehicle for developing frontline leaders and upskilling our managers, not just for process improvement. Projects are chosen by the committee, and decisions are made by consensus. We test for consensus by asking three specific questions: has everyone been heard? Can everyone live with this decision, even if it wasn’t your first or second or third choice – will you try it? And finally, will everyone here support this decision outside this room – are we together in this? We want our improvements to stick.
So that’s the concept, but are they actually making a difference? There are several different ways to answer that question. First, our UBTs are making big, substantive impacts with their projects. One of our CT departments, for example, created a patient staging area and reduced wait times by 20% despite an increase in volume. If the management team had gone to the staff and demanded an increase in volume, the techs would have spit the bit – what stressed the techs out more than anything else was how late they were running pulling in outpatients in the afternoons – the techs wanted to see a decrease in outpatient slots. After setting up the staging area, our techs’ reported stress levels were 40% lower. Happier patients and smoother process made happy techs.
Our managers are also reporting general improvements in productivity and good feeling as a result of their UBT work – a kind of generalized halo effect. I love this quote from one of the NPs in Vascular Surgery – this department started out meeting every other week for 30 minutes, then increased that to every week for 30 minutes, and then they extended the time to a full hour because they felt like they were getting so much out of the time together.
And we’re seeing an effect in our caregiver experience survey results as well. In a recent survey departments with a UBT showed twice the improvement in engagement as our entire system, and four times the improvement in the bundle of questions that basically get at what people think of their boss. And the questions with the biggest gap between departments with UBTs and those without one were “I am involved in decisions that affect my work” and “this organization treats employees with respect”. Remember that we built our partnership on the pillars of increasing participation and improving the culture – I just love that.
Our joint improvement work is also gaining notice in the labor relations universe. Here we are with US Secretary of Labor Julie Su. She’s unfortunately only got a few more weeks in the job.
And of course the best evidence that we’re making an impact is what our caregivers are saying about how UBTs have changed them, and how they feel about coming to work. We’re not going to have time to show you this compilation, but we’ll give you the QR code at the end so that you can watch on your phone – I really hope you will.
So to wrap up, what’s different about these UBTs? First, ownership is truly shared. This is not a top down management thing, but its not just a union initiative either. That’s made it easier to leverage multiple leadership networks, especially our often unsung, informal frontline leaders, and sometimes even those grouches in the department who’ve historically been skeptical of any change. We also think we’ve created a structure that makes it easier to talk about hard things – partnership doesn’t mean that we just act nicey-nice to each other. We don’t tiptoe around the hard stuff. We lean into the process issues that are causing conflict, because we want to solve those things. And finally, with every project, every meeting, we’re teaching our people how to work together better and to solve bigger challenges. We’re doing it in a way that refreshes the manager role, positioning them as mentors and leaders, not just command and control authoritarians. And we’re challenging union reps to not just complain that management hasn’t fixed something yet, but to jump in and organize their coworkers to come up with a better way. And we’re doing it in a way that strengthens psychological safety and combats against of the real power imbalances that can make working in a team so hard.
SHARE UBTs Celebrate Reaching Top Level of Path to Performance
UMass Memorial Health and SHARE leaders recently celebrated an impressive milestone reached by two Unit-Based Teams, or UBTs. A UBT is a frontline-led, department-level improvement system that enables caregivers to work on the process problems that make it hardest for them to feel proud of the care they deliver.
This week, Dr. Eric Dickson and other hospital leaders visited the Vascular Surgery Office and Diabetes/Endocrinology departments to celebrate the teams becoming the first UBTs to reach Level 5 status on the UBT Path to Performance.
While over 75 UBTs have been launched over the last several years across the Medical Center, Medical Group, Revenue Cycle, and Marlborough Hospital, these are the first to have reached this top level of performance.
In order to progress through the Path to Performance, a team, made up of a voluntary group of employees consisting of managers, union organizers, and frontline staff, must demonstrate competence in various ways, with a focus on designing and completing improvement projects in their own department. UBT projects often tackle things such as communication or workflow. The ultimate goal of the UBT is to make their departments better places to work — more enjoyable, smoother running, and easier places to give the high-level patient care that they want to provide.
In addition to delivering to each team a traditional SHARE-UMass Partnership Office award — a balloon shaped like a number “5” — Dr. Dickson heard from caregivers about which UBT projects have meant the most to them, what they are working on now, and how having a UBT has changed how they feel about coming to work.
Congratulations Vascular Surgery Office and Diabetes/Endocrinology UBTs for leading the pack!
Click here to learn more about UBTs, and to find out more about how to launch one in your department reach out to Will.Erickson@umassmemorial.org.
SHARE Updates: PCA Pathway Program, Free English Classes, and Unit Based Teams
PCA Pathway Program Now Accepting Applications
Congratulations to the first graduating cohort of the PCA Pathway Program! They’re now on-the-job as SHARE members, caring for patients at UMass Memorial.
Do you know someone who wants to begin a career at UMass Memorial working on the nursing floors? The Patient Care Associate Program is now open to friends and family of SHARE members!
A Strong Summer for Unit Based Teams
First, the bittersweet news: after helping establish the SHARE-UMass Memorial Partnership Office over the past few years, our beloved UBT Program Coordinator, Stephanie Pepi, has accepted another job at UMass Memorial. We wish you the best in Ophthamology, Steph!
There was nothing bittersweet about the recent FMCS/LERA conference in NYC, where leaders from SHARE and UMass Memorial presented to an international audience about the importance of UBTs.
U.S. Secretary of Labor Julie Su (above, middle left) even pulled the presenters into a meeting to talk about the Labor-Management projects that SHARE members are pioneering on the front lines.
SHARE members Celebrate success — and Share what they’ve Learned — at the 2024 UBT Fairs
The most exciting news for Unit Based Teams this Summer is the fantastic success of the UBT Fairs on both the Memorial and University Campuses, where SHARE members showed off their projects to over 1000 attendees. If you missed it, be sure to check out the most recent UBT Newsletter!
Click the image above for lots more photos of UBT Fair fun
Free English Classes for UMass Memorial Caregivers
UBT Fair 2024 Newsletter
2024 UBT Fair
SHARE-UMass Memorial Unit Based Teams Newsletter
Vascular Surgery Office UBT Reaches Level 4!
The Vascular Surgery Office UBT is among the first in the System to reach LEVEL 4 (High-Performing UBT) on their Path to Performance! That means they’ve hit some serious milestones, and established themselves as a strong team. They’ve presented their work recently to the SHARE-UMass Memorial Leadership Council (LMPC), and it’s clear that their teamwork is turning into some real fun.
Frontline SHARE members in this UBT have developed projects that have yielded measurable and sustainable improvement, and they communicate and celebrate regularly about the work and successes with the whole department.
This Unit Based Team works in the Medical School on University Campus. It is co-led by Beatrice Edmonds and Devon Germak, and is co-sponsored by Jana Hollingsworth and Stephanie Costello. The UBT Committee members include Mary Borrelli, Jeanne Magliaro, Norma Mills, Lindsey Carr and Hannah Akoto-Kesse.
Please congratulate them on their big accomplishment if you see them around!
SHARE Partnership Special: New Videos, UBTs in the National Spotlight, and More!
SHARE has designed, negotiated for, and cultivated the Unit Based Team program as a powerful way for members to be directly involved in the design of our own work. This special newsletter highlights exciting developments since the recent success of the UBT Fair.
SHARE Members on Youtube
With the help of our parent union, AFSCME, we’ve developed three short videos featuring SHARE members who describe what UBTs are, the successes they’ve had, and how the teams make a difference in their work.
All three UBT videos are now prominently featured on the SHARE homepage. Check them out! See anybody you know?
UBTs in the National Spotlight
The US Department of Labor has highlighted the Unit Based Teams in a few of their recent publications and presentations. Read more on the SHARE blog . . .
Congratulations to SHARE member Wanda Dyer, who was quoted in a recent nationwide DOL bulletin, where Wanda describes, “The Labor-Management Partnership between the hospital and the SHARE union allowed us to be involved in a Unit Based Team (UBT) where I was comfortable talking about the challenges in the workflow.
New UBT Coaches
The joint labor-management SHARE-UMass Memorial Partnership Office is growing! UBT experts Will Erickson and Stephanie Pepi have recently been joined by two new UBT Coaches: Jackie Zhou and Joan Perreault. Both have previously worked at UMass Memorial, already demonstrate exceptional skills, and we think they’re fantastic. They’re eager to help support SHARE members to make the current teams stronger and expand UBTs so that even more SHARE members can participate. Welcome Jackie and Joan! We’re excited you’re here!
Welcome to new UBT Coaches Jackie Zhou and Joan Perreault!
First Ever SHARE UBT Fair a Fantastic Success!
The first ever SHARE UBT Fair is one for the books: a brilliant event showcasing projects completed by twenty-three different teams.
Over 600 caregivers in our hospital community came to check out SHARE members’ successes and learn ways to make work better in their own departments.
SHARE members discovered models for improving systems where they work. For example, the Neurodiagnostic Clinic developed a career ladder for staff there to grow and advance in their career, right in their own department. Seen above are NDC Co-Leads Don Chin and Zenel Kurtishaj.
Projects are designed to make the work better in a department . . . but often the results can be felt downstream, making things better for other caregivers as well.
Michelle Locke (above right), management co-lead of the UBT in the Single Billing Office, appreciated the project co-lead by SHARE member Wanda Dyer of the Outpatient Psychiatry Lean Team (above left). Maximizing co-pay collections at the time of service reduces the amount of follow-up work required down the line.
Representatives from the United States Department of Labor made the trip to see just what was going on here. Labor-Management Partnership Coordinators Darnice Marsh (above, far left) and Andrew Hasty (above, far right) are among those in federal leadership working to understand ways that Labor-Management partnerships like our own can serve as a model for broader improvements.
SHARE organizer Janet Wilder (standing on chair) and UMass Memorial Medical Center President Michael Gustafson (left) applauded the work of the Teams. Janet said that, during our union’s twenty-five year history, changing how it feels to come to work every day has been one of the toughest nuts for SHARE to crack . . . but UBTs have begun to do just that, and that we’re going to keep working to keep things getting better.
Incidentally, if you’ve ever been to a SHARE event before, you know that there had to be singing. This time, “The Locomotion” and “Hotel California” became victims to SHARE’s parody lyrics team.
UMass Memorial CEO Eric Dickson offered a video message of support for Unit Based Teams, citing his own belief that people closest to the work have the best ideas about how to make things better.
Dr. Dickson says that over the past ten years, the hospital system has implemented over 100 thousand frontline staff ideas, and affirms that “without reservation, the huddles that I’ve attended that are a part of the SHARE UBTs are the best in the healthcare system.”
Watch Dr. Dickson’s brief message by clicking the image above.
Everyone who came to the event was a winner, of course, but only one person could go home with the Signature SHARE Chocolate Raffle Basket. Congratulations to Nuclear Medicine Technologist (and SHARE member) Maria Nolan!
Learn more about UBTs at
www.sharehospitalunion.org/unit-based-teams
or contact
The SHARE-UMass Memorial Partnership Office
More scenes of partnership can be found online in the growing Partnership Gallery . . .
Barre Clinic UBT Solving the Case of the Missing Lab Orders
The Barre Clinic is at it again, having completed a second project thanks to their department’s Unit Based Team. Patients had been arriving to their lab appointments too often with no active orders to complete the labs. After brainstorming what was causing the problem and how they might best solve it, the team came up with an intervention that everyone could agree to try. Ambulatory Service Reps began checking for orders when scheduling lab appointments, and lab staff started entering orders in real-time for any outside orders that were faxed to the clinic, rather than waiting until the patient arrived.
By making these changes to their daily workflow, the staff have seen a decrease in the number of patients arriving without orders. It used to be common for patients to arrive at the lab without orders, now it is a rare occurrence.
“It cut out a lot of extra work,” says UBT Co-Lead Amy Moisan. Staff are no longer chasing down providers to get orders or ask what labs need to be drawn, and patients no longer wait in the clinic while they look for orders and enter them, saving both patients and staff precious time.
UBT Spotlight: Hahnemann Internal Medicine & The Book of Knowledge
CMG Hahnemann Internal Medicine UBT creates a Book of Knowledge for their clinic so that staff can easily access information
The Unit Based Team in Hahnemann Internal Medicine has created a way to make everyday information — as well as not so frequently asked questions — easily accessible to their staff.
The staff in the clinic found that they were wasting time looking for answers to commonly needed information. They were spending time looking through saved documents and emails to find answers to everyday questions such as accepted insurances, phone numbers, CPT codes just to name a few.
So, they gathered up the information that they had saved in various places to create a binder, or “The Book of Knowledge.” Now, each time they receive new information of value, they add it to the binder so that it is easily accessible.
It’s an uncomplicated idea with a fun, grandiose name. But coordinating this information has saved the staff a lot of time, giving them instant access to needed forms, cutting down on wait times to find information, and having everyone on the same page when giving information to their patients. “Now that we have pertinent information at our fingertips,” says management co-lead Katherine Auger, “the patients can receive correct information from all staff in a timely manner.”
Reach Department Goals by Aligning your UBT Project!
A Unit Based Team (or UBT) is a group of frontline employees, managers, and physicians from the same department who come together to work on meaningful projects to improve caregiver satisfaction and patient care, while improving the way they feel about coming to work every day. This project does just that!
Rheumatology Department UBT Improves Communication about Wait-Times
Department metric: improve patient satisfaction.
As a first project to work on, the UBT in the Rheumatology Department on the Memorial campus chose to communicate better with their patients about wait times once they were roomed.
An example of the timer outside a patient room in the Rheumatology Clinic
How did they do it?
The UBT worked to to re-educate the staff on timer protocols; a schedule was put into place to check on the timer batteries, and a standard location was established to ensure the timers are in the same location outside of every exam room, so they are not overlooked. The staff would then check-in with the patients according to the timer to communicate the wait time and offer some water.
The Results?
The results are positive! Caregivers now update patients more frequently about their wait times. And that’s provided additional opportunities for communication between patients and caregivers.
These check-ins have increased patient satisfaction and improved Press Ganey patient comments regarding wait times. Caregiver satisfaction improved, too!
This worked so well for their clinic, the members of the UBT were asked to present it at the All-Managers Meeting!
Way to go, Rheumatology!
Psychiatry Lean Team UBT Kicks Off New Improvements
Another Unit Based Team is on their way to making positive change at UMMH!
UBT committee members at the department orientation at
100 Century Drive . . . attending both in-person and virtually
The Psychiatry Lean Team at 100 Century Drive recently came together to form a UBT. They started to meet and work on several projects a few months ago. We’re looking forward to seeing how these projects develop.
The UBT is already experiencing a change in the way the department communicates. “It has been helpful for the team; everyone wants to be heard and this allows the perfect venue for this to happen,” said Management Co-Lead Michelle Rickert
Their UBT committee includes:
SHARE Co-Leads, Sherrell Cooley and Wanda Dyer
Management Co-Lead, Michelle Rickert
Management Co-Sponsor, Derrick Tallman
SHARE Co-Sponsor, Carol Hehir
SHARE Updates: Poster Unveiling Event TODAY, New Negotiations Website, Spotlight on the Memorial Inpatient Pharmacy
Don’t Forget: 2022 Signature Poster Unveiling Event TODAY!
Over 2,400 SHARE members signed-on to our statement in support of a strong contract before it was time to send to the printer. Today we the reveal the poster in all of its glory. If you’re on the University campus, we encourage you to come to the big event. Come find your own signature on the poster, bring a copy back for your department, and enjoy a free sandwich. (More details on the flyer below.)
You can also pick up a poster at signature events including Memorial campus next Wednesday [[details]]. More sites, including for employees with work-from-home arrangements, will be announced soon.
New Contract Negotiations Website
The best way to find out about what’s happening in contract negotiations is to come to information meetings and talk with SHARE Reps and Organizers firsthand. So you can always have useful information at your fingertips, we’ve also dedicated a new section of the SHARE website to round up contract negotiation resources. On the new site you can find:
Links to negotiations updates & contract event announcements
Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about negotiations
“Always Essential” graphics (with directions about how to add them to your email signature or virtual meeting background)
And lots more ways that you can support a strong contract!
UBT Spotlight: Memorial Inpatient Pharmacy
Congratulations to the Unit Based Team in the Memorial Inpatient Pharmacy! SHARE members and other staff there are now experiencing smoother transitions among roles and shifts, thanks to a project designed to measure and improve communication. Learn more about how they did it in this UBT Spotlight post.
SHARE Updates: Negotiations, Signing On, Wearing Red, and More
YOU Can Help SHARE Bring Home a Strong Contract!
Through countless conversations and survey responses, you’ve told SHARE what matters to you. Our negotiating team is making the case to the hospital that it needs to invest more in SHARE members. We need meaningful raises. Here are some ways to support SHARE now:
Sign-on to the 2022 SHARE Poster for a Strong Contract. If you already signed — thank you! If you haven’t already, we urge you to do that asap! Just talk to the SHARE Rep in your area, or call or email the SHARE office.
Wear red on Thursdays to show solidarity with the negotiating team as they meet with management.
Every day is a good day to wear your SHARE “Always Essential” button!
Stay informed! Read on below to learn what’s happening now. For a look back at recent updates, check out posts marked #Negotiations
SHARE members in Urology are wearing their red! Pictured here are SHARE Union Rep Miranda Leger, LPN; SHARE Union Rep Yvonne Ashworth-Thayer, LPN; and SHARE member Alexandra Towouh, LPN
Negotiations Update
Our negotiation sessions are still all about the money. After presenting initial proposals, both teams have made adjustments to their positions in response to the interests we’ve heard from each other. In case you’ve missed it, SHARE’s proposal is designed to:
Take inflation and the rise in cost-of-living expenses into account.
Make sure SHARE members make progress every year as their experience grows.
Catch up to what other employers are paying so that UMass Memorial can hire and fill positions, so SHARE members aren’t so short-staffed.
Deal with the fact that the rising minimum wage in Massachusetts, added to the national staffing shortage, makes it especially hard to retain staff.
Recognize SHARE members’ hard work during COVID and now – SHARE members are Always Essential!
Negotiations Update: Side tables
While the main Negotiations is all about the money, two side tables are focused on other good things for SHARE members. The “Leaves & Absenteeism” side table continues to work to streamline the Leave of Absence programs. SHARE wants to make it easier for you to understand what programs are useful to you, while at the same time retaining the job protections currently available.
The “Career Advancement” side table is exploring ways to make it easier for you to get the education you want and to grow in careers at UMass Memorial. SHARE and management members had an exciting meeting with representatives from the Ben Hudnall Memorial Trust (BHMT) at Kaiser Permanente, a nationwide healthcare provider network based on the West Coast engaged in Labor Management Partnership. The BHMT has developed over the years to help over 110,000 union members have access to training and academic degree programs with zero out-of-pocket costs. Their system provides a useful model for what our hospital and union could do right here.
SHARE Testifies for Bed Expansion
SHARE testified in support of adding beds at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health virtual hearing about UMass Memorial’s application to add 91 new inpatient beds: 72 at the “NIB” (New Inpatient Building, the old Beaumont nursing home building next to University Campus), and 19 at Memorial.
In her testimony, SHARE Organizer Janet Wilder described how difficult it is for SHARE staff to provide care in these circumstances: feeling bad for making patients wait, always juggling, always running – it’s exhausting! Read the full post here . . .
Updates from the SHARE-UMass Memorial Partnership Office
SHARE’s Unit Based Teams continue to expand and make important strides toward improving how it feels to come to work in our hospital. And the SHARE-UMass Memorial Partnership Office continues to develop new ways to support those teams. We’re excited to hear these new updates from them . . .
PCA Committee Off to a Strong Start
Congratulations on launching your team!
Already got a UBT? Check this out . . .
Unit Based Teams Peer-Learning Event
Heidi Brazeau, SHARE UBT Co-Lead, describes to the virtual crowd how her department improved tracking the many different forms that patients bring for them to process at the Hahnemann Family Health Clinic
Earlier this month, twenty-plus UBT Co-Leads from SHARE and management met online to compare notes about what makes for a successful project. Four teams — Hahnemann Family Health Clinic, Inpatient Pharmacy, Rheumatology, and Respiratory — each presented about a project their team had undertaken. They described how the project made things easier for staff in their department, what it’s done to improve patient care, and why the department is better able to take pride in their work as a result. In each case, these particular teams chose to develop some kind of system for themselves that created standard work that suited the needs of their department.
Congratulations to each team for these successes! Check out the slides below for details about each. . . .
UBT Shout-Outs: Barre
A new Unit Based Team kicked off their first meeting in Barre on April 8th. They have begun meeting every other Friday. They spent their first two meetings brainstorming ideas and have decided to work on creating a standard work process for forms. This will include disability, workers comp, FMLA, etc., with the aim to reduce the number of patient inquiries after dropping the forms off as staff can advise them on timelines, in addition to keeping the paperwork better organized. You’re off to a great start, Barre!