Episode 19: Recognizing employees’ value in improvement processes
With Stephanie Mercado
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Key Takeaways
In this week’s inspirational episode of the Leading Real Change podcast, Stephanie Mercado CEO of the National Association of Healthcare Quality shares how her organization transformed healthcare quality from compliance to competencies and career paths that lead to greater improvements and employee engagement.
Key takeaways include:
Moving beyond compliance as a box checking exercise involved creating a list of competencies that would lead to improved quality in daily work practices
Operationalizing quality improvement processes allowed employees to see the important role they played in driving better care
The list of competencies allowed employees to see how they could continue to grow in their careers by building more capacity to contribute to stronger quality processes
Stephanie shared how she connected her role to improving healthcare for all so her kids could understand why her work had meaning
In the same way quality improvement is an ongoing process, Stephanie believes that leadership is also an ongoing process of persisting on a journey of growth
Having purpose related to delivering better outcomes is a key employee engagement strategy.
Guest Bio
Stephanie Mercado,CAE, CPHQ, is the chief executive officer/executive director of the National Association for Healthcare Quality® (NAHQ), the leader in industry-standard healthcare quality and safety competencies, training, and certification in healthcare quality for individuals working in healthcare quality. Under Mercado’s leadership, NAHQ has expanded its footprint to support healthcare organizations develop capabilities and systematically build capacity for quality, leading to a more engaged and effective workforce.
Mercado brings more than 20 years of healthcare industry experience to her role. Since joining NAHQ in 2013, Mercado has been focused on understanding unmet needs to advance quality and safety and building solutions to solve these known and unknown challenges. She commissioned innovations and introduced methodologies to research and define standardized competencies and develop never before available data and insights to drive workforce development. Getting arms around the challenge and creating a vision for the future has resulted in advancement of quality professionals and increased visibility and credibility of healthcare’squality workforce.
A highly sought-after speaker and author on healthcare quality workforce development and system sustainability, Mercado speaks nationally about strategies to drive healthcare quality and improve healthcare outcomes via the biggest lever healthcare has to affect change, the workforce.
