Webinar Preview: Equity and Engagement: An Approach to Improving Staff Vaccination Rates

We have an exciting webinar that we're hosting on December 7th, with a group from Legacy Health presenting about approaches they used to dramatically increase staff vaccination rates.

Click the image below for the webinar registration page. In this post, you can read a transcript of an 8-minute preview podcast that we recorded with two of the presenters:

• Dominic (Dom) Chan; director of pharmacy
• Lisa Goren; vice president, Organizational Effectiveness & Talent

Listen to the Podcast:

Read the Transcript:

Mark Graban: Oh, hi, everybody. Welcome to this special bonus episode of "Habitual Excellence." I'm Mark Graban from Value Capture. Today, we are giving a short preview of a webinar that's been presented on Tuesday, December 7th, at one o'clock Eastern.

The webinar is titled "Equity and Engagement -- An Approach to Improving Staff Vaccination Rates." It's going to be presented by a team of four people from Legacy Health. We're joined by two of them today for a quick preview.

You can register for the webinar by going to valuecapturellc.com/webinars, or you can look for a link in the show notes to this episode. The four presenters/panelists are Dr. Nick Kashey, Vice President of Population Health for Legacy Health, Dr. Jennifer LeTourneau, the Clinical Vice President of Medical Education, and we are joined today by the other two presenters.

Dominic Chan, a Director of Pharmacy, and Lisa Goren, Vice President of Organizational Effectiveness and Talent. Thanks to you both for being here today. I think we're going to throw things first to Dominic to give a little bit of an overview of why this webinar is such an important topic.

Dominic Chan: Thanks, Mark. I want to thank you for this opportunity just to give a little preview, but the reason why we did this is that in the third quarter of 2021, government entities enacted vaccine requirements across multiple employment sectors, including healthcare.

Experience from previous vaccine campaigns started to emphasize the need to translate community modalities of vaccine outreach and education that partnered strongly with stakeholders who identified as Black, Indigenous, or peoples of color to increase vaccine confidence broadly.

We couldn't just take an electronic approach. We couldn't just take a traditional approach to addressing vaccine confidence. What we're going to be doing is we're going to describe our experience of how we attempted to do this at Legacy Health.

Mark: Lisa, what would you add about the work that's been done at Legacy and the results and the importance of increasing confidence in vaccination rates?

Lisa Goren: Sure. Well, we operated with the premise that a mandate or a requirement is the lowest-level reason a person would make a change, particularly one that impacts them at such a personal level.

We quickly assembled a team to think through more of the change management behavioral economics side of this and look through an equity lens.

We're talking about behavior change, with a goal to help people make the decision that was best for them, not to convince them to take a particular action.

Now, of course, we were overt. This is our perspective because we're a healthcare organization.

We wanted to make sure that, through using this equity lens, we were giving people access to information that they understood, that would help drive their thinking, that they could share with other people, and also safety.

Where they could ask questions and not feel shame about that, and certainly, not feel any level of power over them as they were making this decision.

During our webinar, we're going to talk practically about the experiments, frankly, that we ran in a short period of time.

What worked? What didn't work? The pivots that we made, and ultimately, the success that we were able to achieve by ensuring one of the highest vaccination rates in the state of Oregon at a healthcare organization.

Mark: I love the focus on engagement, aiming higher than just compliance to a mandate. It sounds like there are lessons learned here that would be applicable to many future situations unrelated to vaccination. What are your thoughts on that?

Lisa: Absolutely.

Today, it's vaccination. Tomorrow, it's something else.

Again, if we're [laughs] living in a world where we're just abiding by requirements and mandates, we're absolutely not engaging the workforce.

Let's be honest. The engagement of the healthcare workforce is in fact the most important workforce to be engaged in this moment. We want people who are healthy, we want people who are happy, and we want people who want to be in their jobs and doing the best job that they possibly can.

We take that seriously at Legacy. We always have. This was an opportunity for us, frankly, to walk our own talk.

Dominic: Yeah, I think that's something that's also really important and organic, is the first time that Lisa and I even talked about this, about doing this, we were looking at each other virtually and just saying that there's not enough time for us to do this perfectly.

Instead, just as Lisa highlighted, that we're going to do the best job that we can with the time that we have, and we're going to gather as many people who believe in this and the cause, and the rightness of how this has to be done right, as quickly as possible, and learn as fast as we can as we continue to iterate, make mistakes, and improve the process with that deadline in place.

Mark: I appreciate that approach, and it'll be good to hear more about that in the webinar. Instead of spending the time and cooking up a perfect approach upfront, the way to get closer to perfect is through those cycles, iteration, and learning from mistakes or missteps, or however you want to frame that.

That's an inevitable part of an effective improvement cycle, in my experience, so I'm happy to hear that that was your approach. Maybe just a final question for either or both of you. The four of you doing the presentation and the panel seem to represent a cross-functional team.

Can you talk about how it was important to gather people from different disciplines and backgrounds to help tackle this?

Dominic: I think that it reflected the workforce that we were trying to address, is that when you take the stereotype of healthcare, you just think clinicians. Too often, every single other department other than frontline clinical departments are not thought of when we're thinking about it from a media level or a stereotype level.

I think that this group that forms is iconic of what our scope and vision was, is to ensure that no one was left behind, and no one was forgotten in this process in how quick we were approaching this.

Mark: Lisa, anything else you would add on that?

Lisa: I would add that this is an effort that was truly about customer value and designing to what the customer needs.

In this case, the customers being our racially diverse employees, first and foremost, but those who are unvaccinated.

The folks that we were able to engage in this work -- which, by the way, numbered over 60 individuals who assembled very quickly to do this as really their second job on top of a first job that was demanding -- it not only reflected our workforce but it was customized to our target audience if you will.

Mark: Thank you for the work that you've done, and thank you for your willingness to share the process, the approach, the lessons learned, and the results. I'll look forward to hearing more in the webinar. Again, that's going to be held live, Tuesday, December 7th, one o'clock Eastern.

The title again is Equity and Engagement -- An Approach to Improving Staff Vaccination Rates, reflecting the work that was done at Legacy Health, and the lessons that we hope others will take away from this. Again, you can register at valuecapturellc.com/webinars.

If you attend live, there'll be a lot of opportunity for you to ask questions. If you're not able to attend live, please go ahead and register, anyway. We will email out a link to the recording on the next day. We're going to share the audio of the session here in the podcast feed for you to listen to as well.

I hope you'll join us. Dom and Lisa, thank you both in advance for the webinar. Thanks for doing a preview here today.

Lisa: It's our pleasure.

[background music]

Mark: Thanks for listening to Habitual Excellence, presented by Value Capture. We hope you'll subscribe to the podcast, and please also rate and review it in your favorite podcast directory or app. To learn more about Value Capture and how we can help your organization on this journey to habitual excellence, visit our website at www.valuecapturellc.com.