Your help appreciated in strengthening our culture of safety

By Liz Withers, MD, MBA, Good Samaritan Chief Medical Officer

Our Senior Leadership Team at Good Samaritan recently made the thoughtful decision to prioritize our culture of safety. We want to discuss it with intention and compassion, gather your feedback to understand your perspective, and take steps together to ensure everyone who works here feels valued and supported.

This endeavor is essential to ensuring optimal teamwork and the highest-quality, safest care. It also will significantly improve our work environment – another factor that contributes equally to our ability to meet our patients’ needs.

Once this starts to roll, a strong culture of safety will become a self-feeding cycle that will help sustain the quality of our patient care and our own satisfaction, in both our day-to-day work and more broadly in our decision to dedicate our lives to healing others.

It sounds like a win-win. But recent events have revealed that more work is required to expand our grace and extend the promise to everyone that all are valued and trusted. This culture shift begins with us, your senior team, and our commitment to reevaluate how we interact with everyone who works here, and then lead by example.

So let’s start here: We trust you and everyone we’ve hired to fill an essential role on your care team. You all are respected and empowered to act in the best interest of your patients.

When fielding a question from a caregiver or a suggested change to your patient’s plan of care, or when asked to consider a perspective that differs from your own, receive it with curiosity and respect and respond with appreciation and validation, even if – and, maybe, especially if – you reject the suggestion. We promise to do the same.

Please join us today in this long-term work and hold us accountable to the commitment that we will actively and doggedly pursue the ideal culture of safety with transparency and generosity, for everyone in the Good Samaritan community.

Please click here to share your thoughts with me about our culture. Thank you for your partnership. You are sincerely appreciated and vital to our mission.