Meet the nominees for the 2013 KGH Team Awards

The nominations are all in, and the winners of this year's KGH Team Awards will be officially unveiled on Friday, Jan. 24. Eleven different teams are nominated this year for their efforts to support KGH delivering Outstanding Care, Always.

"The KGH Team Awards are our hospital's highest honour and are an important opportunity to recognize and celebrate all the great work happening here to transform the patient and family experience," says Shannon Graham, VP of People Services and Organizational Effectiveness.

As you will see below, each of the teams, nominated by KGH staff members, has made a unique and important contribution to change how our hospital functions.

Surgical Oncology Wait Time Improvement Team - This team has created a new wait list management process and developed a new set of tools to allow KGH to closely and actively manage the cancer surgery patient wait list in real time to make sure that patients get to the OR within set time frames. This new process ensures that all preventable delays in the patient's journey are eliminated. As a result, the percentage of cancer surgery patients seen within provincial wait time targets has risen from 63 per cent in May 2012 to 94.5 per cent in November 2013.

Staff Wellness Team - The Staff Wellness team focused on the development of KGH's workplace wellness program in 2013, which aims to better support the physical and mental well-being of our staff. This team delivered several key items this year, including the opening of the Staff Wellness Centre, development of the KGHwellness.ca website, an Employee Mental Health Toolkit, creation of the Wellness Champion role, a Peer Partner Program, on-site fitness classes, and the roll-out of the FeelingBetterNow mental health program.

Ventilator Equipment Pool  - The Ventilator Equipment Pool is celebrating its 20th anniversary at KGH in 2014 and the team is busier than ever. The program has provided equipment and services to more than 6,500 patients since its inception in 1994. Last year alone, their 24-hour hotline received 8,200 calls. In 2013, the team set out to cut wait times for new patients and was able to reduce them from an average of 10 weeks to an average of two. The improvement of wait times means patients are receiving their equipment earlier and can be discharged from hospital sooner. This has contributed in a positive way to preventing gridlock at KGH.

Maintenance Team - There are many teams here at KGH that contribute to the overall patient care experience, and our Maintenance Team is one of them. This is especially true on Burr 4. When the facilities are damaged in that area of the hospital, the team rapidly responds to make repairs to ensure the patient environment is safe again. This work prevents rooms from being closed for long periods of time and allows patients to be quickly admitted to the hospital from the Emergency Department. In this way, the Maintenance Team also uniquely contributes to preventing gridlock at KGH.

Automated Drug Cabinet (ADC) Project Team - This team's work has improved patient safety here at KGH through its focus on improving medication storage, distribution and dispensing processes. The first automated cabinet was placed in a unit in February 2013 and by November, ADCs were in place on 13 units. This involved changing the workflow for approximately 650 nurses, 50 respiratory therapists and the Pharmacy department. The units with the new drug cabinets have seen improved access to patient medications, reductions in the number of calls to Pharmacy, reductions in Safe Reports related to the medication order process and improvements in inventory control.

Medical Dosimetry Team - The Dosimetry team at KGH has played an important role in the delivery of new treatment techniques that have given cancer patients who come to the hospital the option to receive new and innovative radiation therapies. Team members work together with other staff to create, introduce and monitor these techniques. With the introduction of these treatment plans, the team members are able to allow higher doses of radiation to be used with a much smaller area of normal tissue being affected, giving the patient better survival outcomes.

Engagement Tactics Team - The Engagement Tactics Team has been nominated for its outstanding support, contribution and commitment to the successful roll out of the KGH Employee & Physician Engagement Surveys. The surveys had an impressive 64 per cent response rate. Team members became survey advocates in the hospital, ensuring their colleagues were aware of the survey and kept up to date on the results. Engaging with employees is key and this team is helping keep the focus on engagement, so we can deliver Outstanding Care, Always in everything we do.

Special Coagulation Laboratory - The Special Coagulation Laboratory has been nominated for its work in supporting high-level care for about 300 patients of the Bleeding Disorders Clinic of Southeastern Ontario each year. Our lab provides diagnostic testing for a number of inherited bleeding disorders and completes these difficult tests with a high level of expertise. The team is often consulted to provide testing for many difficult cases that are referred to KGH.

KGH Payroll Team - The Payroll team has been nominated for its work in helping to launch the University Hospitals Kingston Foundation (UHKF) Staff Lottery. Employees can sign up and make a $5 donation through payroll deduction each pay period and then be entered into a $1,000 draw. The KGH Payroll Department has played an instrumental role in making the project successful, by entering the deductions each week ensuring that more than 650 KGH participants are entered into the program correctly and in a timely manner. This work has already allowed the lottery to raise $60,000 for KGH, Hotel Dieu Hospital and Providence Care.

Lung and Colorectal Diagnostic Assessment Program - Team The Diagnostic Assessment Program (DAP) Team is dedicated to improving and enhancing patient and family experiences from the suspicion, to the diagnosis or ruling out, of cancer. A key task for this team is to decrease wait times and the team identified a number of ways to make improvements, resulting in significant reductions. Seventy-six per cent of patients now meet the 28-day provincial target, up from 23 per cent and now well above the provincial average of 50 per cent. This makes the South East Regional Cancer Program Lung DAP team a leading performer in the province.

Santa Claus Parade Float Team - Thanks to a dedicated team, KGH participated in the Kingston Santa Claus Parade. KGH's float featured a theme of the hospital's 175th anniversary. Partnering with patients and families was part of this initiative and Patient Experience Advisors joined in on the fun. The team helped foster the development of a culture that KGH is not just a hospital, but a "community of people" as well. These team members served as role models and ambassadors for our hospital.