Advanced Burn Care

Good morning.

On Monday, faculty and staff will receive an email from Press Ganey with a link to an employee engagement survey. I encourage – sincerely ask – you to complete this brief, confidential survey before the deadline of Feb. 24. We want and need to hear your voice!

It’s been said in this column and other places several times but is worth repeating – YOU are our greatest asset. The Medical Center can achieve excellence in fulfilling our responsibilities to the communities we serve because of the hard work and dedication of our faculty and staff.

Now, it’s your turn to talk to us. Give us input on how engaged you feel as an employee, what we are doing right and/or areas where we can improve. Your survey results can have a significant impact on how our organization moves forward to reach our goals. What’s most important, though, is that we are moving forward together and that you feel your role at the Medical Center has value. If that is or isn’t the case, now is your chance to let us know.

Your responses to the survey can and do impact organizational outcomes in areas like quality and safety, patient experience, finances and culture. Knowing how engaged you are as an employee helps us make key decisions affecting those areas and more. Your voice matters, and we are listening.

Some examples of how past survey results yielded change and opportunities for increased engagement:

• You said UMMC needs a culture that promotes patient safety. We hired more mobility technicians and trained safety coaches.
• You said UMMC needs more efforts aimed at highlighting clinical quality. We started sharing YOUR good news and successes through an annual Excellence Showcase during Patient Safety Week and a Project Spotlight on the intranet.
• You said UMMC needs better multidisciplinary communication in the hospital. We instituted daily rounds that include members of the care coordination and nursing teams.
• You said UMMC needs a performance-based merit compensation process. We certainly heard this one and responded in force. Since April 2024, we have gone through not only a round of merit-based compensation increases – a $11.1 million investment affecting 5,479 employees – but also of market-based adjustments – a $13.7 million investment impacting 3,874 employees.
• You said UMMC needs to better recognize staff. We installed “You Make an Impact” boards in some clinics. The DAISY Awards got a boost, prompting more than 1,800 nominations with 18 recognized winners.
• You said UMMC needs more robust staffing. Human Resources hired additional recruiters to help with staffing needs within all mission areas. For the hospitals, we hired skilled international nurses and more than 180 nurse graduates. And we looked toward the future by engaging with hope-to-be health professionals through increased outreach efforts at high school health care academies. To help keep who we have in place, we rebooted the Retention Council.

I highlight these improvements – which certainly are just a sampling – so you can see that your feedback is meaningful and useful. And there are more actions in discussions or in the works. We may not be able to address all your requests/comments at one time, but all of it gets considered. The more we learn about your experience as a UMMC employee, the more informed our decisions that may impact you will be.

When employees feel valued and are engaged, they are more effective in the workplace and are more likely to stay with an organization long-term, building their careers there. That’s the goal! We want you to be fulfilled as a UMMC employee and work here for years and years. Again, YOU are our greatest asset, and we want to commit to your workplace engagement in a way that matches the commitment you make daily in helping us reach A Healthier Mississippi.

We’re listening!