Spring Summer 2018

The Oregon Caregiver Spring/Summer 2018 www.ohca.com 8 understanding and acting is an exercise in leadership,” she said. For long term care administrators, Kohnen Adriance said part of their job is to create spaces for teams to come together to talk about key issues that need to be addressed and then to ensure that staff leads use the right tools to address those issues. The LiveWell program uses visual tools to get team members pointed in the right direction. “You bring the team together and you discuss the issues that you are going to work on. You track it using the visual management tools that are part of the LiveWell toolbox,” she said. These tools are designed to be visually compelling. “They lend themselves to quickly seeing what is happening in a community in respect to problem areas. Whether those areas are unplanned absences, falls, medication errors, off- label use of anti-psychotic medication, or over-use of antibiotics, these are measures that we have that the communities are tracking,” Kohnen Adriance said. From there, the staff leads also need to find the place where the visuals will live and be visible to everybody. She said the tools are designed to create a culture of inquiry where people are encouraged to ask questions about why problematic events, such as an increased number of falls with injury, are happening and what they can do about them. It also encourages staff to come up with ideas to try, and if the first idea doesn’t work, then to try something else. “We believe that people are the greatest resource in long term care. In community after community, we find that caregivers are a true source of inspiration and ideas on how to improve quality care,” Kohnen Adriance said. “If you just rely on positional powers and positional leadership you have a really narrow view of what’s going on.” Demi Haffenreffer, President and CEO of Haffenreffer & Associates, Inc., has been serving the long term care profession as a consultant for over 35 years. She also facilitates a regular OHCA workshop on leadership and culture. This workshop was started by the American Health Care Association (AHCA) 15 years ago, and Haffenreffer was on the development committee. Through this workshop, she helps participants assess themselves over 14 leadership areas. “By the end of the day, they have a road-map to where they might improve their leadership skills,” she said. As an example, the first of the leadership areas is “living mission and values.” “This area is about how participants promote the missions and values of their organizations,” Haffenreffer said. If the mission is about integrity, Haffenreffer may ask workshop participants to document examples of how they promote integrity in their facilities. By the end of the workshop, Haffenreffer said the participants choose an area to work on and establish goals and a six-month plan on how they’re going to improve that area. Haffenreffer has an interesting method to hold them accountable. “What I do is collect a letter that they write to themselves concerning the area they want to improve on, and then I collect that and mail it to them in six months,” she said. Of the 14 categories, Haffenreffer said two areas for professional development FEATURE » PROMOTING QUALITY THROUGH LEADERSHIP, CONT. Nicolette Merino leads an internal workshop on leadership with Avamere staff.