Achieving sustainability. It’s a frustrating fact: Healthcare leaders struggle to make positive changes last.

The Language of Caring for Staff® sticks. We know our clients invest precious time, money, and high hopes in the Language of Caring for Staff, and we ensure it lives and breathes daily within your organization … far into the future.

The Language of Caring® team helps you not only sustain the improvement spikes typical of first-year implementation but also improve more over time.

To assist in our proven strategies, we also draw heavily from Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point in which Gladwell identifies the forces needed in order to create contagious change and make the changes stick.

How do we do it? During initial implementation, Language of Caring partners work with you to tailor a sustainability plan informed by best practices from other organizations. Typically, after engaging in our assessment and interim evaluation process, we work with strategy leaders to engage key stakeholders in a streamlined process that results in a crystallized Sustainability Plan.

Our sustainability options are designed to strengthen nine Success Factors using our Success Factors Profile:

Critical Success Factors:

1. Connecting the Dots: Integration with Mission, Vision, Values, and Priorities
2. Sponsorship
3. Leadership Commitment and Skill Modeling
4. Performance Management and Accountability
5. Patient and Family Engagement
6. Frontline Engagement and Skill Mastery
7. Physician Engagement and Skill Mastery
8. Measurement and Feedback
9. Recognition

Grounded in clarity about strengths, gaps, and emerging needs, planning teams select and/or develop tactics that address their specific needs.

Language of Caring provides rich resources and tactics that strengthen sustainability. For example:

• Leadership development and assessment to ensure skill mastery, role modeling, and effectiveness as coaches
• A Client Portal that provides quick, daily skill practice and mastery in teams to create “muscle memory” and habit
• Development of teams of peer champions and frontline coaches
• Ongoing culture-building through powerful story-sharing processes
• Further alignment of Human Resource practices to support employee performance of Language of Caring skills
• Language of Caring projects in which specific departments (e.g. Nursing, E.D., Dialysis, Transport, and Rehab) employ anxiety mapping to drive proactive use of the Language of Caring skills
• Short and long-term recognition methods and contests that celebrate effectiveness of individuals and teams
• Leadership meeting designs that keep managers engaged