Sacred Care for St. Joseph Health

Email this case study to a friend

Friend's email

Your Name

Your Email

Subject

Message Sacred Care The St. Joseph Health System, a large Catholic health-care provider with 14 hospitals in California, New Mexico, and Texas, fulfills its mission to care for body, mind, and spirit by embracing three tenets: “perfect care,” “healthiest communities,” and “sacred encounters.” In 2010, SJHS came to IDEO with a large-scale systems design challenge around the third tenet: How could health-care providers throughout the system enable interactions to be “sacred encounters” through innovative, compassionate acts of care? After intensive research and design prototyping, IDEO developed and scaled an innovative new organizational capacity at SJHS called “spotlighting.” Amplified system-wide, spotlighting can have a profound impact on a patient’s health-care experience. The idea, which draws inspiration from hotel “scenography,” is designed to help frontline caregivers sweep their attention over creative, thoughtful ways to introduce healing moments that honor dignity, care, compassion, and connection during hospital admission, bedtime, and discharge routines. These healing moments differ from department to department. One labor and delivery department practices the spotlighting method by taking photographs of families as they leave with their new babies. Elsewhere, spotlighting might mean providing a warm blanket or an extra chair, unasked. In the emergency department, spotlighting includes a warm welcome at arrival. Many emergency department waiting rooms are impersonal way stations; a nurse yells out your name and everyone looks up. But at one SJHS hospital—St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, California—the spotlighting team has developed a compassionate, dignified alternative. Now, when patients first arrive, the admission nurse jots down what they are wearing. That way nurses can find patients quietly and warmly escort them back to an exam room. “Taking that extra step to find that person and address them in a quiet voice does not take a lot of time, but it honors that person’s dignity at a time when they may be in pain and afraid,” explains Elisa Tagaloa, a facilitator at St. Jude’s hospital. Tagaloa, who started work at the hospital 24 years ago, considers spotlighting one of the most thrilling opportunities of her tenure. To scale the spotlighting idea system-wide, IDEO considered operational agendas, logistical decisions, and local adaptations that would allow staff to sustain changes over years to come. IDEO designed a two-week training module and tool kit that guides health-care teams through the process of creating and modifying new practices for patient interactions, including a spotlighting tool used to build key healing moments, called “scene-building.” The tool kit includes three starter “scenes” as inspiration, and provides a step-by-step process for creating, revising, and refining changes as they are put into practice. A new full-time staff position of Spotlighting facilitator oversees the initiative and coordinates various departments as they design and implement scenes. After pilot-testing the spotlighting method for six months at four Southern California hospitals, patient feedback has been so positive that the concept is rolling out system-wide. Staff members also have embraced spotlighting. Sr. Jayne Helmlinger, SJHS executive vice president of mission integration, says she is amazed by the innovative ways different departments have brought the human touch back into the high-tech world of medicine. One reason for this IDEO systems design success is because spotlighting meets the needs of the staff, not just the patients. “What I’ve noticed is that it taps back into why they became a nurse or a tech in the first place,” says Helmlinger. “You wouldn’t see that energy and passion if you said, ‘Okay let’s work on getting our customer service numbers up.’” http://www.ideo.com/work/sacred-care

The St. Joseph Health System, a large Catholic health-care provider with 14 hospitals in California, New Mexico, and Texas, fulfills its mission to care for body, mind, and spirit by embracing three tenets: “perfect care,” “healthiest communities,” and “sacred encounters.” In 2010, SJHS came to IDEO with a large-scale systems design challenge around the third tenet: How could health-care providers throughout the system enable interactions to be “sacred encounters” through innovative, compassionate acts of care?

After intensive research and design prototyping, IDEO developed and scaled an innovative new organizational capacity at SJHS called “spotlighting.” Amplified system-wide, spotlighting can have a profound impact on a patient’s health-care experience. The idea, which draws inspiration from hotel “scenography,” is designed to help frontline caregivers sweep their attention over creative, thoughtful ways to introduce healing moments that honor dignity, care, compassion, and connection during hospital admission, bedtime, and discharge routines. These healing moments differ from department to department. One labor and delivery department practices the spotlighting method by taking photographs of families as they leave with their new babies. Elsewhere, spotlighting might mean providing a warm blanket or an extra chair, unasked. In the emergency department, spotlighting includes a warm welcome at arrival.

Many emergency department waiting rooms are impersonal way stations; a nurse yells out your name and everyone looks up. But at one SJHS hospital—St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, California—the spotlighting team has developed a compassionate, dignified alternative. Now, when patients first arrive, the admission nurse jots down what they are wearing. That way nurses can find patients quietly and warmly escort them back to an exam room.

“Taking that extra step to find that person and address them in a quiet voice does not take a lot of time, but it honors that person’s dignity at a time when they may be in pain and afraid,” explains Elisa Tagaloa, a facilitator at St. Jude’s hospital. Tagaloa, who started work at the hospital 24 years ago, considers spotlighting one of the most thrilling opportunities of her tenure.

To scale the spotlighting idea system-wide, IDEO considered operational agendas, logistical decisions, and local adaptations that would allow staff to sustain changes over years to come. IDEO designed a two-week training module and tool kit that guides health-care teams through the process of creating and modifying new practices for patient interactions, including a spotlighting tool used to build key healing moments, called “scene-building.” The tool kit includes three starter “scenes” as inspiration, and provides a step-by-step process for creating, revising, and refining changes as they are put into practice. A new full-time staff position of Spotlighting facilitator oversees the initiative and coordinates various departments as they design and implement scenes.

After pilot-testing the spotlighting method for six months at four Southern California hospitals, patient feedback has been so positive that the concept is rolling out system-wide. Staff members also have embraced spotlighting. Sr. Jayne Helmlinger, SJHS executive vice president of mission integration, says she is amazed by the innovative ways different departments have brought the human touch back into the high-tech world of medicine.

One reason for this IDEO systems design success is because spotlighting meets the needs of the staff, not just the patients. “What I’ve noticed is that it taps back into why they became a nurse or a tech in the first place,” says Helmlinger. “You wouldn’t see that energy and passion if you said, ‘Okay let’s work on getting our customer service numbers up.’”