July 22, 2025 • 17 mins
Dr. Raj Chand, President at Inova Fair Oaks Hospital, joins the podcast to address the pressing issue of psychological safety and workplace violence in healthcare. He outlines key initiatives such as the “Care Imperatives” and “Care Peer Support Program,” and reflects on how the COVID-19 pandemic intensified social polarization, staff pressures, and resource constraints. Dr. Chand also shares his leadership approach to de-escalation and fostering a supportive work environment for caregivers.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
Podcast, and I'm excited to be joined today
by doctor Raj Chand, who is the president
at Inova Fair Oaks Hospital. Raj, thanks for
being here today. Let's start by having you
tell us a little bit more about yourself,
Inova, and your journey in health care leadership.
Awesome, Grace. Well, thanks for inviting me to
the podcast. I've been a longtime listener and
(00:22):
excited to be here with all of you
today.
So as you mentioned, my name is Raj
Chand, and I'm a healthcare executive.
I'm also an emergency medicine physician. And it's
hard to believe now I've been practicing clinically
for almost two decades and have over a
decade of experience
in healthcare leadership.
I currently serve as the president of Inova
(00:43):
Fair Oaks Hospital,
and I'm really proud to share that Fair
Oaks is one of the few community hospitals
in the country
to be named a Leapfrog Top Hospital five
years in a row. That's something that we're
very proud of.
My clinical experience
has shaped the areas that I'm most passionate
about in leadership,
areas like workforce development,
(01:04):
building high performing teams, and workplace safety.
And then when I'm not at work, I
try to squeeze in some Orangetheory workouts where
I work my second job,
which is an Uber driver for my two
teenage kids. So that's a little bit about
me.
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for sharing.
And can you tell us a little bit
more about Inova?
(01:25):
Absolutely.
Inova Health System is located about thirty minutes
west of Washington, DC.
We are a five hospital system with more
than 1,800 licensed beds.
We have 300 plus ambulatory sites,
6 and a half billion in revenue in
2024, and more than 25,000
proud team members.
(01:46):
And since 2018, we have been on a
transformation journey ever since doctor Steven Jones joined
us as our system CEO.
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much.
And now let's jump into kind of reframing
the problem that you're here to talk about.
So can you touch on some of the
experiences or individuals that have shaped your focus
on workplace culture and safety?
(02:08):
Yeah. That's a great question
and one that I've thought about a lot
as I have stepped into this leadership role.
And one moment that I will never forget
was almost twenty years ago.
I was a senior resident in emergency medicine.
I was working an evening shift, just like
every other evening shift. And then all of
a sudden, I heard one of our behavioral
(02:29):
health patients
start banging on the door and then actually
pound the door down,
come out of the room and then tackle
one of my co residents.
And all of us who were there were
just shocked, we jumped into action,
we restrained the patient,
medicated the patient, made sure he was okay,
we made sure my colleague was okay.
(02:51):
And then what was most notable to me
now in this role is we just went
about our normal business. We just accepted this.
This was part of what happens
in healthcare.
There was no debrief,
there was no type of after action review,
no type of systemic change. And I actually
realized I had not been trained to either
recognize or respond to workplace violence, and so
(03:12):
it really was normalized at the time.
And so
now fast forward twenty years, I'm really proud
to be at Inova,
and I think I believe
we have a very strategic systematic
approach to workplace violence. We have multiple tools
for our team members.
And while workplace violence has really increased over
(03:33):
those two decades,
I also believe our response capabilities have significantly
improved. And we'll talk a little bit about
some of the tools that we have.
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for sharing.
And that kind of segues us perfectly into
this first topic of reframing the problem.
So what is the connection that you see
between psychological safety and workplace violence?
(03:56):
At Inova,
we have a set of principles that guide
our daily work. We call them care imperatives.
And one of the care imperatives is we
must create a culture of psychological safety that
empowers each team member to fully engage.
And for us,
psychological safety is the foundation for both patient
safety and
(04:17):
team member safety.
The easiest way that I can explain psychological
safety is openness without fear. We want people
to feel safe to speak up, and in
healthcare that really is very, very important.
Whenever I'm on a podcast, I always like
to share some resources that I think are
can be helpful.
There is a fantastic
book on this topic called The Four Stages
(04:39):
of Psychological Safety
by an organizational psychologist named Tim Clark. He
also has a phenomenal
podcast that's called Leader Factor, so for those
who are looking to go deeper on that
topic.
And my management team at Fair Oaks, we
took about six months to slowly go through
that book and try to understand some of
those principles.
(04:59):
Principles like inclusion safety, learner safety, contributor safety,
challenger safety,
and ultimately
we believe
that when people feel safe to share their
experience,
we will be better positioned to respond to
workplace violence.
Absolutely. That makes so much sense.
And how would you describe the current scope
(05:21):
of the workplace violence you see in health
care?
Unfortunately, as I mentioned,
health care is one of the industries that's
most prone to workplace violence. I believe we
have five times
the rate of workplace violence compared to other
industries,
and eighty two percent of nurses experience workplace
violence at some time during their careers. And
(05:43):
there are a set of contributing factors that
have really been amplified over the past several
years.
There's three in particular that I think of.
One is just the broader societal polarization that
we're seeing.
Two is the pandemic really brought that all
into stark relief and
accelerated tensions and increased some of that polarization.
(06:06):
And then three is just the workforce pressures.
Our patients are more complex.
There are greater time constraints.
Depending on the environment that you're in, there
can be resource limitations.
So all of those things have increased the
work the pressures on our workforce,
which I think have also connected to workplace
violence.
(06:26):
Absolutely.
And now let's kind of shift focus to
the organizational
response.
And I'd love to know how Inova Health
System has approached workplace violence from a strategic
perspective to help remedy these issues.
We have been on this journey since 2018
to try to address workplace violence,
(06:47):
not with one off interventions or one off
solutions, but really to think about it as
an ecosystem and to take a really strategic
systemness lens to this. So we have an
ecosystem of solutions that we've tried to deploy
and there's there's four in particular that I
think about.
One is a philosophy
around zero harm and that applies
(07:07):
to both patients and team members.
For so long, we just accepted workplace violence
as part of what it means to work
in health care, and we now have a
very different stance on that. We also second,
we have a zero tolerance policy. So we
have very clear boundaries
for patients,
for families, and visitors.
And visitor patients certainly obviously have the the
(07:30):
most
rights within a hospital system or health care
organization,
but we've been very, very mindful around making
sure that we are approaching families and visitors
and really setting limits around that. So that
those are some of our concepts around zero
tolerance.
Third is training and education. And
as I mentioned in the example at the
(07:51):
beginning, I had not really been trained in
how to recognize the warning signs. I didn't
know how to deescalate
properly
and how to respond when a workplace filing
situation arose.
So we have annual training depending on the
type of work that you do in the
organization
around each of those things, recognition, de escalation,
response.
And so that's another important component.
(08:12):
And then fourth,
and this has really been a shift as
well, is engaging our physicians and APPs in
this work.
Historically, this has been something that nurses have
carried the mantle on, and we're moving beyond
a nursing only lens to include
the entire multidisciplinary
clinical team to address our challenges with workplace
(08:34):
violence.
Absolutely.
And what are some of the tactical elements
of this response that you're speaking of? And
can you walk us through the specific tools
and supports that you've implemented?
Sure.
Let's start out with some of the ones
that I think are a little bit more
widespread in the health care industry
(08:56):
that we have, and I imagine others have
as well.
Tools like the Broset scale, which is a
standardized
risk scoring system that we've that our team
places in Epic so that everyone has visibility
around the risk of workplace violence with a
given patient.
We implemented
a weapons detection technology at many of our
(09:16):
entry points, not every single one, but
many of the key points have a weapons
detection system there.
And we've also implemented an armed officer program.
So
those three, I think, are pretty widespread in
the health care industry.
There are a few
that are unique to Inova, and I'll comment
a little bit about those.
(09:37):
Much of our focus has been on prevention,
kind of the ounce of prevention is worth
a pound of cure idea.
And so the first thing that I would
say around prevention is
we have two levels of response.
Historically, we would just have this kind of
security assistance, which would be security would come
in, sometimes they would need to go hands
on. But we now have kind of a
(09:57):
much more nuanced response system, and we have
what we call safe teams. So think of
this as like a rapid response
for workplace violence. And when anyone can activate
a safe team,
it brings about
a multidisciplinary
group who comes to the room. It often
includes two security officers.
It'll include our administrative director, which in some
(10:19):
organizations is called the nursing supervisor,
brings
the leadership team as well. So the senior
director is there, the clinical director,
and the clinical team, the physician or the
APP that are involved in that care of
the patient. And then that that team huddles
up because every patient is really unique,
every workplace violence situation is unique,
and they'll determine
(10:41):
what the best course of action is in
terms of medications or setting limits or engaging
others. So that's probably been our first,
initiative in terms of preventing workplace violence before
it becomes very serious.
The second, and this is something that I'm
really proud of, it was a pilot
that began at Fair Oaks Hospital,
(11:01):
is what we call the workplace violence magnet
program.
So these are, just as you would imagine,
little yellow magnets
that we place on the doors, the door
frames,
of those patients who are at risk
for violence. And what it does is, what's
pretty unique about it is it alerts all
staff, not just clinical staff. And when you
(11:22):
think about it, not everyone who works in
the hospital has access to Epic.
Teams like environmental services,
food services,
transport,
oftentimes, they're not really interacting in Epic. But
when they see that yellow magnet, they know
they're on heightened alert.
They often we often ask and
encourage people to have a buddy system so
(11:44):
not to go into those rooms alone.
And in the year plus that we've had
this program,
we've seen about a 10% reduction in physical
events, which is
pretty significant.
And then the joint commission and the national
quality forum, those organizations characterize any type of
inappropriate physical contact as a sexual assault. And
I'm proud to say we went from about
(12:06):
two of those per year to zero,
since this initiative went into place. So lots
of really great progress at the workplace violence
magnet.
The third component of our response,
is what we call the administrative discharge policy.
So we talked a little bit about how
we set limits
with
(12:26):
families and visitors, and that's much easier.
And we recognize that there's a a subset
of patients
who often
continue to
act up or
act in ways that are not in accordance
with our values or how we want our
our team members to experience them. And so
we go through a kind of three pronged
(12:46):
approach
with setting limits,
engaging clinical leadership,
and then ultimately
we engage either the CMO or myself
to administratively discharge patients from the hospital, and
we certainly provide them with every provide them
with medications and prescriptions and follow-up resources,
but we very much set limits, and the
(13:08):
administrative discharge policy has been very successful.
Probably a dozen or more patients
have been discharged through that pathway, and I
think it creates
a sense for our frontline teams that our
leadership team has their back and supports them.
And then,
unfortunately, no matter what we do, sometimes workplace
(13:29):
violence events are going to happen, and we
have a very
robust chaplaincy program, we have an employee assistance
program,
and we also have something called the CARE
peer support program.
So these are frontline team members
who are specially trained. They go through about
a four hour training,
and their function is really just to be
(13:49):
present, to listen without judgment, with compassion,
and it's not centered around problem solving. It's
just what I mentioned, just listening and being
there for your colleague.
And that often really goes a long way
when there's a workplace violence event or some
other type of adverse event that happens in
the hospital. So a pretty robust framework that
we have around addressing workplace violence.
(14:13):
Absolutely. It sounds like you've done a lot
of really great work to,
address and minimize these issues. So as we
kind of close out our conversation here, first,
I'd love to know what leadership lessons you've
learned throughout this work.
I think there's three. That's a great question.
One is recognizing
(14:33):
that there are complicated problems, and then there
are complex problems. So what do I mean
by that? Complicated problems are things where there
is a known problem, known solution,
something straightforward like building a car, you know
who you have to pull together and the
set of steps to get to a functioning
car. Workplace violence is not complicated. It is
complex.
It is multifactorial.
(14:55):
It is unpredictable.
There's lots of different players. And so I
think the analogy I always have in my
mind around complex problems is traffic jams. You
never really know how it's gonna emerge or
how it ends.
And so
it requires a very different mindset.
It requires an adaptive mindset and adaptive management,
and it requires us not to have just
(15:15):
one time fixes for these complicate for these
complex problems.
The second leadership lesson that I've learned is
what we talked about at the very beginning,
really being a systems thinker around this
and investing in an ecosystem of solutions.
When you have these multiple reinforcing interventions, I
mean, we talked about probably close to a
(15:36):
dozen
interventions, large and small,
during this conversation.
And together, those reinforcing interventions help us create
sustainable change.
Ultimately, that requires changing the culture,
and it really requires a lot of reinforcement
because team members change, People forget the resources
that are available to them. So having a
very
(15:57):
strong systems thinking lens on this is really
important.
And the last lesson that I would say
is just one that I have learned over
twenty years, which is
reframing this priority. Team member safety is the
foundation of patient safety. And I think when
you take that seriously,
frontline team members feel it. They feel supported
(16:17):
by their leadership teams, and, ultimately, I think
there's better outcomes for patients and our team.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that.
And then my final question for you as
we wrap up our conversation
is, what advice would you offer to other
health care leaders facing similar challenges with workplace
violence?
(16:39):
The advice that I would offer to other
leaders as they focus on this is this
is
something that has to be managed.
It's not something that really goes away. And
even though we have all of these tools
in the toolbox,
we unfortunately still grapple with workplace violence
on a daily, if not weekly basis within
our hospitals and care sites.
(17:01):
And so this has to be a priority
for leadership teams on an ongoing basis.
It has to be part of the culture,
and the culture really needs to shift in
some of the ways that we've talked about
for this to be a sustainable change for
us.
A 100%. Well, Raj, thanks so much for
taking the time to speak with me today
(17:22):
and address this important issue and what you've
seen working and the efforts that you've taken
to take steps to solve this. Thank you
so much.
Great. Thanks for having me on the podcast,
Grace. Great to chat with you. Absolutely.
This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
Podcast, and I'm excited to be joined today
by doctor Raj Chand, who is the president
at Inova Fair Oaks Hospital. Raj, thanks for
being here today. Let's start by having you
tell us a little bit more about yourself,
Inova, and your journey in health care leadership.
Awesome, Grace. Well, thanks for inviting me to
the podcast. I've been a longtime listener and
(00:22):
excited to be here with all of you
today.
So as you mentioned, my name is Raj
Chand, and I'm a healthcare executive.
I'm also an emergency medicine physician. And it's
hard to believe now I've been practicing clinically
for almost two decades and have over a
decade of experience
in healthcare leadership.
I currently serve as the president of Inova
(00:43):
Fair Oaks Hospital,
and I'm really proud to share that Fair
Oaks is one of the few community hospitals
in the country
to be named a Leapfrog Top Hospital five
years in a row. That's something that we're
very proud of.
My clinical experience
has shaped the areas that I'm most passionate
about in leadership,
areas like workforce development,
(01:04):
building high performing teams, and workplace safety.
And then when I'm not at work, I
try to squeeze in some Orangetheory workouts where
I work my second job,
which is an Uber driver for my two
teenage kids. So that's a little bit about
me.
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for sharing.
And can you tell us a little bit
more about Inova?
(01:25):
Absolutely.
Inova Health System is located about thirty minutes
west of Washington, DC.
We are a five hospital system with more
than 1,800 licensed beds.
We have 300 plus ambulatory sites,
6 and a half billion in revenue in
2024, and more than 25,000
proud team members.
(01:46):
And since 2018, we have been on a
transformation journey ever since doctor Steven Jones joined
us as our system CEO.
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much.
And now let's jump into kind of reframing
the problem that you're here to talk about.
So can you touch on some of the
experiences or individuals that have shaped your focus
on workplace culture and safety?
(02:08):
Yeah. That's a great question
and one that I've thought about a lot
as I have stepped into this leadership role.
And one moment that I will never forget
was almost twenty years ago.
I was a senior resident in emergency medicine.
I was working an evening shift, just like
every other evening shift. And then all of
a sudden, I heard one of our behavioral
(02:29):
health patients
start banging on the door and then actually
pound the door down,
come out of the room and then tackle
one of my co residents.
And all of us who were there were
just shocked, we jumped into action,
we restrained the patient,
medicated the patient, made sure he was okay,
we made sure my colleague was okay.
(02:51):
And then what was most notable to me
now in this role is we just went
about our normal business. We just accepted this.
This was part of what happens
in healthcare.
There was no debrief,
there was no type of after action review,
no type of systemic change. And I actually
realized I had not been trained to either
recognize or respond to workplace violence, and so
(03:12):
it really was normalized at the time.
And so
now fast forward twenty years, I'm really proud
to be at Inova,
and I think I believe
we have a very strategic systematic
approach to workplace violence. We have multiple tools
for our team members.
And while workplace violence has really increased over
(03:33):
those two decades,
I also believe our response capabilities have significantly
improved. And we'll talk a little bit about
some of the tools that we have.
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for sharing.
And that kind of segues us perfectly into
this first topic of reframing the problem.
So what is the connection that you see
between psychological safety and workplace violence?
(03:56):
At Inova,
we have a set of principles that guide
our daily work. We call them care imperatives.
And one of the care imperatives is we
must create a culture of psychological safety that
empowers each team member to fully engage.
And for us,
psychological safety is the foundation for both patient
safety and
(04:17):
team member safety.
The easiest way that I can explain psychological
safety is openness without fear. We want people
to feel safe to speak up, and in
healthcare that really is very, very important.
Whenever I'm on a podcast, I always like
to share some resources that I think are
can be helpful.
There is a fantastic
book on this topic called The Four Stages
(04:39):
of Psychological Safety
by an organizational psychologist named Tim Clark. He
also has a phenomenal
podcast that's called Leader Factor, so for those
who are looking to go deeper on that
topic.
And my management team at Fair Oaks, we
took about six months to slowly go through
that book and try to understand some of
those principles.
(04:59):
Principles like inclusion safety, learner safety, contributor safety,
challenger safety,
and ultimately
we believe
that when people feel safe to share their
experience,
we will be better positioned to respond to
workplace violence.
Absolutely. That makes so much sense.
And how would you describe the current scope
(05:21):
of the workplace violence you see in health
care?
Unfortunately, as I mentioned,
health care is one of the industries that's
most prone to workplace violence. I believe we
have five times
the rate of workplace violence compared to other
industries,
and eighty two percent of nurses experience workplace
violence at some time during their careers. And
(05:43):
there are a set of contributing factors that
have really been amplified over the past several
years.
There's three in particular that I think of.
One is just the broader societal polarization that
we're seeing.
Two is the pandemic really brought that all
into stark relief and
accelerated tensions and increased some of that polarization.
(06:06):
And then three is just the workforce pressures.
Our patients are more complex.
There are greater time constraints.
Depending on the environment that you're in, there
can be resource limitations.
So all of those things have increased the
work the pressures on our workforce,
which I think have also connected to workplace
violence.
(06:26):
Absolutely.
And now let's kind of shift focus to
the organizational
response.
And I'd love to know how Inova Health
System has approached workplace violence from a strategic
perspective to help remedy these issues.
We have been on this journey since 2018
to try to address workplace violence,
(06:47):
not with one off interventions or one off
solutions, but really to think about it as
an ecosystem and to take a really strategic
systemness lens to this. So we have an
ecosystem of solutions that we've tried to deploy
and there's there's four in particular that I
think about.
One is a philosophy
around zero harm and that applies
(07:07):
to both patients and team members.
For so long, we just accepted workplace violence
as part of what it means to work
in health care, and we now have a
very different stance on that. We also second,
we have a zero tolerance policy. So we
have very clear boundaries
for patients,
for families, and visitors.
And visitor patients certainly obviously have the the
(07:30):
most
rights within a hospital system or health care
organization,
but we've been very, very mindful around making
sure that we are approaching families and visitors
and really setting limits around that. So that
those are some of our concepts around zero
tolerance.
Third is training and education. And
as I mentioned in the example at the
(07:51):
beginning, I had not really been trained in
how to recognize the warning signs. I didn't
know how to deescalate
properly
and how to respond when a workplace filing
situation arose.
So we have annual training depending on the
type of work that you do in the
organization
around each of those things, recognition, de escalation,
response.
And so that's another important component.
(08:12):
And then fourth,
and this has really been a shift as
well, is engaging our physicians and APPs in
this work.
Historically, this has been something that nurses have
carried the mantle on, and we're moving beyond
a nursing only lens to include
the entire multidisciplinary
clinical team to address our challenges with workplace
(08:34):
violence.
Absolutely.
And what are some of the tactical elements
of this response that you're speaking of? And
can you walk us through the specific tools
and supports that you've implemented?
Sure.
Let's start out with some of the ones
that I think are a little bit more
widespread in the health care industry
(08:56):
that we have, and I imagine others have
as well.
Tools like the Broset scale, which is a
standardized
risk scoring system that we've that our team
places in Epic so that everyone has visibility
around the risk of workplace violence with a
given patient.
We implemented
a weapons detection technology at many of our
(09:16):
entry points, not every single one, but
many of the key points have a weapons
detection system there.
And we've also implemented an armed officer program.
So
those three, I think, are pretty widespread in
the health care industry.
There are a few
that are unique to Inova, and I'll comment
a little bit about those.
(09:37):
Much of our focus has been on prevention,
kind of the ounce of prevention is worth
a pound of cure idea.
And so the first thing that I would
say around prevention is
we have two levels of response.
Historically, we would just have this kind of
security assistance, which would be security would come
in, sometimes they would need to go hands
on. But we now have kind of a
(09:57):
much more nuanced response system, and we have
what we call safe teams. So think of
this as like a rapid response
for workplace violence. And when anyone can activate
a safe team,
it brings about
a multidisciplinary
group who comes to the room. It often
includes two security officers.
It'll include our administrative director, which in some
(10:19):
organizations is called the nursing supervisor,
brings
the leadership team as well. So the senior
director is there, the clinical director,
and the clinical team, the physician or the
APP that are involved in that care of
the patient. And then that that team huddles
up because every patient is really unique,
every workplace violence situation is unique,
and they'll determine
(10:41):
what the best course of action is in
terms of medications or setting limits or engaging
others. So that's probably been our first,
initiative in terms of preventing workplace violence before
it becomes very serious.
The second, and this is something that I'm
really proud of, it was a pilot
that began at Fair Oaks Hospital,
(11:01):
is what we call the workplace violence magnet
program.
So these are, just as you would imagine,
little yellow magnets
that we place on the doors, the door
frames,
of those patients who are at risk
for violence. And what it does is, what's
pretty unique about it is it alerts all
staff, not just clinical staff. And when you
(11:22):
think about it, not everyone who works in
the hospital has access to Epic.
Teams like environmental services,
food services,
transport,
oftentimes, they're not really interacting in Epic. But
when they see that yellow magnet, they know
they're on heightened alert.
They often we often ask and
encourage people to have a buddy system so
(11:44):
not to go into those rooms alone.
And in the year plus that we've had
this program,
we've seen about a 10% reduction in physical
events, which is
pretty significant.
And then the joint commission and the national
quality forum, those organizations characterize any type of
inappropriate physical contact as a sexual assault. And
I'm proud to say we went from about
(12:06):
two of those per year to zero,
since this initiative went into place. So lots
of really great progress at the workplace violence
magnet.
The third component of our response,
is what we call the administrative discharge policy.
So we talked a little bit about how
we set limits
with
(12:26):
families and visitors, and that's much easier.
And we recognize that there's a a subset
of patients
who often
continue to
act up or
act in ways that are not in accordance
with our values or how we want our
our team members to experience them. And so
we go through a kind of three pronged
(12:46):
approach
with setting limits,
engaging clinical leadership,
and then ultimately
we engage either the CMO or myself
to administratively discharge patients from the hospital, and
we certainly provide them with every provide them
with medications and prescriptions and follow-up resources,
but we very much set limits, and the
(13:08):
administrative discharge policy has been very successful.
Probably a dozen or more patients
have been discharged through that pathway, and I
think it creates
a sense for our frontline teams that our
leadership team has their back and supports them.
And then,
unfortunately, no matter what we do, sometimes workplace
(13:29):
violence events are going to happen, and we
have a very
robust chaplaincy program, we have an employee assistance
program,
and we also have something called the CARE
peer support program.
So these are frontline team members
who are specially trained. They go through about
a four hour training,
and their function is really just to be
(13:49):
present, to listen without judgment, with compassion,
and it's not centered around problem solving. It's
just what I mentioned, just listening and being
there for your colleague.
And that often really goes a long way
when there's a workplace violence event or some
other type of adverse event that happens in
the hospital. So a pretty robust framework that
we have around addressing workplace violence.
(14:13):
Absolutely. It sounds like you've done a lot
of really great work to,
address and minimize these issues. So as we
kind of close out our conversation here, first,
I'd love to know what leadership lessons you've
learned throughout this work.
I think there's three. That's a great question.
One is recognizing
(14:33):
that there are complicated problems, and then there
are complex problems. So what do I mean
by that? Complicated problems are things where there
is a known problem, known solution,
something straightforward like building a car, you know
who you have to pull together and the
set of steps to get to a functioning
car. Workplace violence is not complicated. It is
complex.
It is multifactorial.
(14:55):
It is unpredictable.
There's lots of different players. And so I
think the analogy I always have in my
mind around complex problems is traffic jams. You
never really know how it's gonna emerge or
how it ends.
And so
it requires a very different mindset.
It requires an adaptive mindset and adaptive management,
and it requires us not to have just
(15:15):
one time fixes for these complicate for these
complex problems.
The second leadership lesson that I've learned is
what we talked about at the very beginning,
really being a systems thinker around this
and investing in an ecosystem of solutions.
When you have these multiple reinforcing interventions, I
mean, we talked about probably close to a
(15:36):
dozen
interventions, large and small,
during this conversation.
And together, those reinforcing interventions help us create
sustainable change.
Ultimately, that requires changing the culture,
and it really requires a lot of reinforcement
because team members change, People forget the resources
that are available to them. So having a
very
(15:57):
strong systems thinking lens on this is really
important.
And the last lesson that I would say
is just one that I have learned over
twenty years, which is
reframing this priority. Team member safety is the
foundation of patient safety. And I think when
you take that seriously,
frontline team members feel it. They feel supported
(16:17):
by their leadership teams, and, ultimately, I think
there's better outcomes for patients and our team.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that.
And then my final question for you as
we wrap up our conversation
is, what advice would you offer to other
health care leaders facing similar challenges with workplace
violence?
(16:39):
The advice that I would offer to other
leaders as they focus on this is this
is
something that has to be managed.
It's not something that really goes away. And
even though we have all of these tools
in the toolbox,
we unfortunately still grapple with workplace violence
on a daily, if not weekly basis within
our hospitals and care sites.
(17:01):
And so this has to be a priority
for leadership teams on an ongoing basis.
It has to be part of the culture,
and the culture really needs to shift in
some of the ways that we've talked about
for this to be a sustainable change for
us.
A 100%. Well, Raj, thanks so much for
taking the time to speak with me today
(17:22):
and address this important issue and what you've
seen working and the efforts that you've taken
to take steps to solve this. Thank you
so much.
Great. Thanks for having me on the podcast,
Grace. Great to chat with you. Absolutely.
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