Mayo Clinic Transformed its Culture and Reduced the Number of Adverse Events by 50%

Culture was, and is the heart of Mayo’s “Commitment to Safety” vision and promise. In 2011, Mayo Clinic leadership realized their patient safety survey results significantly underperformed at ~50th percentile. And with 20 sites with over 800 different cultures and no good way to measure and address this undesired variance, they had a herculean task ahead of them.

We helped them develop a plan to address some of these issues and to start moving their organization toward the transformation they desired. We took a look at measuring and interpreting key domains from their SCORE Survey. It would be imperative to have engagement and training of leaders and managers on key insights to create “change readiness” required to enable transformation.

The following were essential in Mayo Clinic’s transformation:

Leader-defined vision for culture and reliability

Identify and target setting using data and considering strategic initiatives. Facilitate ongoing multi-disciplinary engagement.

Laser focus on strengths and opportunities

Leaders understood high-value culture opportunities that directly correlated to patient harm and waste.

Culture is Local

Engagement of clinical and non-clinical managers and teams across continuum to provide knowledge tactics and tools to enable culture change, including visual management boards to huddle and round.