Speak up; ‘Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs’ to protect your hospital!

'Speaking up' is a culture of choice for hospital management practice in raising concerns of system breaks and or situation of harming to the patient, family and staff or becoming aware of risky or incomplete actions of others within hospital teams. It’s important to create a “Speak Up” culture where staff members feel comfortable going to report management when delicate problems arise. Staffs know things that leaders don’t. Far too often, they won’t tell leaders or managers even if it impacts patients in a negative way. Because hospital’s leaders know this, that’s why they encourage staffs to bring forth any concerns they have involving patient care. They talk a lot about creating a “speak up” culture where staffs feel safe to verbalize concerns, mistakes, or near misses without fear of retaliation or punishment. But 90% time, it is all just lip service? No one bothered; ultimately the poor staffs become victim of sufferings. According to the Joint Commission, 70% of medical errors can be linked to poor communication in one way or another- root-cause problem lies on Speak Up!

In general hospital staffs are extremely kind hearted and dedicated for delivering care to the patient. Sometimes they try to earn full satisfaction by taking care of them and beyond. Why? They care their patient as if they are their own family. And hospitals’ culture of Zero-Harm practice is one of the remarkable driving forces to make patient feel more save and secure.

Still there is always some darkness beneath the candle light of what we can’t avoid it. That’s why Not everything is perfect in any hospital. There are some situations of where staffs want to speak up but afraid of doing so as because they don’t want any unnecessary distresses or troubles or complexity. Generally, our hospital colleagues are simple, honest and peaceful, they don’t want any unwanted distress and they really afraid of big mouth. Actually not afraid of but they know that these big mouths can make their life troublesome, annoying and, they naturally don’t want to invite problems and or add complexity in their life. So, they keep silent. It doesn’t mean they accept everything. They don’t, but they compromise with the situation! They go for wait and see strategy!

Do you think management doesn’t know this situation? They do, but they are also sometimes helpless if you don’t speak up, if you don’t raise incident, if you don’t raise your voice and that’s good way to find your voice and inspire other to speak up. That’s why the Joint Commission’s patient safety program designs on Speak Up. The goal of Speak Up is to help patients and their advocates become active in their care and the Joint Commission launched Speak Up in 2002. By 2017, the program had reached people in more than 70 countries and received numerous awards. For 2018, the Speak Up program was refreshed and relaunched in May to be more valuable and useful.

Not only the Joint Commission, but the WHO celebrates globally the first ever World Patient Safety Day under the theme “Patient safety: a global health priority” with a campaign aims to speak up for the right of people to safe health care. This Speak Ups program to wakeup call for patients who suffer harm in health care to be actively involved in their care, well informed of their situation, provided full information about their medical history and asked questions while receiving health care.

That’s means the situation is going to be worse if you don’t speak up during care. The JCI and WHO encourages patient to speak up. In this sandwich situation, if you don’t speak up, you affected by sandwich pressure from both sides: [1] Big mouth person, and [2] Patient and family. Better to speak up about care and create a transparent open system before someone demonizes you.

So, till today you have only one option left and that is ‘Speak up’. It’s the only way to ‘Find your voice and inspire others to find theirs’ to protect your hospital, protect your life, protect your patient from harm, protect your working harmony, protect your jovial system!

Don’t keep silent; it doesn’t bring any value to anyone anymore. It doesn’t matter what you speak up but mater is you shouldn’t keep silent when you see any system breaks!

Don’t afraid of anything, anyone! Just Speak up for any reason where system is broken or care is compromised and that’s the only way you find your voice here! Don’t afraid of. That’s why famous novelist,

Elif Shafak says "One should never, ever remain silent for fear of complexity"!

And professional GURU,

Stephen Covey said, “Control does not inspire people to do their best work – in fact it does the opposite – it breeds resentment.”

He determined the 8th habit is your voice and wrote in his book: The 8th Habit – From Effectiveness to Greatness talking about your mindset and amazing leadership. How many of us have said “I would have done that if only …”? Actually in life there is no ‘if’ and ‘only’!

That’s why Cover said, “Your power to choose the direction of your life allows you to reinvent yourself, to change your future, and to powerfully influence the rest of creation.”

And that’s how it works in your daily life to find your voice. If you keep silent and wait for the moment or if the situation changes, it will never happens. The control of ‘if’- it is in our voice by speaking up.

To find your job satisfaction and passion, you need to find out your soul code. How?

Here is what Cover said again, “… when you engage in work … that taps your talent and fuels your passion – that rises out of a great need in the world that you feel drawn by conscience to meet – therein lies your voice, your soul’s code.”

It is not only the responsibility of the hospital leaders to inspire all staff within hospital to find their own voices so that they can use their talents to advance the goals. Now situation changes, if you don’t speak up on system breaks and keep silent to report incidents, once the whole broken system will come to your shoulder and you will also be liable for not speaking up. Furthermore, your patient starts to speak up against your system if there is any broken and the big mouth accuses you for that liability. The better you speak up the earlier to fix the problem and protect your hospital.

So if you wanna find your voice and inspire others to find theirs voice to secure your working happiness, the only option left is for you to Speak Up and makes a transparent working place, where you can all work together like a happy family.

“The successful person has formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do. Successful people don’t like doing them either, necessarily. But their dislike is subordinated by the strength of their purpose.”- Stephen Covey

“The greatest and most inspiring achievements in history are not so much stories of individual achievement, but are stories of the extraordinary power of a unified, talented, prepared team that stays loyally committed to one another and to their shared vision to the end.”- Stephen Covey