You might not realize it, but at most hospitals, systems and IDNs, value analysis team leaders and team members are volunteers, denoting they have a full-time job in some other department (e.g., nursing, operating room, accounting, etc.) of your healthcare organization. Therefore, they don’t need to be on your VA team(s) or be involved in your quality, safety, and savings initiatives. It’s a choice.
When you think of your VA team leaders and members in this light, you can then manage them in a different way for even better outcomes. To quote Susan J. Ellis, The Volunteer Guru, “The best volunteering is when the giver and the recipient see each other as equivalent or equal – when they both benefit and it’s a form of exchange…”
To this end, here are three little known secrets on how to get more benefits from your volunteer value analysis team leaders and team members:
- Develop a Comprehensive Onboarding Protocol: It is rare to find a hospital, system, or IDN having a comprehensive onboarding protocol (including VA practitioner training) for their new value analysis volunteers. Most of the time, volunteers are recruited to be on the healthcare organization’s value analysis team and then invited to the next value analysis team meeting without any idea of what it is all about. How would you feel as a volunteer if this happened to you?
- Respect Their Time and Challenges: Too often, value analysis team meetings are too long, boring, and not very productive. Why would a volunteer want to be involved with a VA program that doesn’t respect their time or challenges back in their home department? Therefore, streamline your VA team meetings to be short, exciting, and productive. More and more, healthcare organizations are having virtual VA meetings for this very reason.
- Reward Them for Their Efforts: I like to call this – new pay for new work. Just because someone is volunteering for a VA team doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be rewarded with praise, trophies, and cash awards for reaching certain team goals and objectives (e.g., 100% attendance at VA team meetings for 90 days could be rewarded with a $25.00 gift certificate or two movie tickets).
Managing volunteer value analysis teams is an art and science that can reap great benefits for all involved parties and can lead to even greater volunteer involvement. Finally, Ellis tells us that, “…your personal philosophy and values about volunteer involvement are integral to the ultimate success of your (healthcare) organization’s volunteer (value analysis) engagement strategy.” It’s something you should think long and hard about!