On most college campuses around the country, it is not likely that you would walk into a classroom and find nurses and healthcare workers sitting next to M.B.A. students working together to develop solutions to the daily challenges hospitals face, but that is exactly what happened recently at the University of Miami.



Forty nurses and healthcare workers and 20 UM business-school students for the last six months have been learning new skills, creating flow charts, brainstorming ideas and developing detailed, professional PowerPoint presentations as part of an innovative leadership development program started by the University of Miami and 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East – Florida Region.



The mission of the 1199SEIU/UMH Transformational Leadership Program, which was overseen by the labor-management partnership office at UMH with classes taught by Dr. Howard Gitlow, a professor of management science at the University of Miami School of Business Administration, was to develop workers’ and students’ leadership skills to make healthcare delivery at UMH even better.



“I think one of the most important things about being in this program is that it really allows you to stand out as a leader,” said Nadege Guerrier, a registered nurse who has been working at UMH for 12 years. “When you as an employee are engaged in your department, you don’t have to wait for your director to say ‘this needs to be done.’ You see a problem, you see a change, and you step up to the plate. You realize that I can get with my co-workers to see what solutions we can come up with.”



The program included classroom sessions on organizational behavior, understanding and mapping a process, collecting and analyzing data and process improvement methodologies, as well as group projects developed by nine departmental teams in the hospital.



Each group, consisting of healthcare workers paired with an M.B.A. student, was tasked with developing solutions to real challenges the workers are facing in their departments. Challenges included reducing patient wait times, increasing efficiency, and improving communication and information exchange between departments.



“The hospital itself and all other organization are putting a lot of new initiatives in place to accommodate the changes that are happening now [in healthcare]. I think this program really is one of the programs you want as an organization to engage your staff because they’re the ones on the front line who are dealing with the patients on a daily basis. When they’re engaged then the results will come,” added Guerrier.



On January 31, the groups presented the departmental projects they worked on to a room full of hospital administrators and frontline workers, and the results were outstanding.



In the radiology department, the time it takes to administer care to patients was reduced. Positive changes were implemented to improve the transfer of patients from one department to another. Supply rooms are much more organized making it easier to find supplies quickly. And service orders from the different hospital departments to the service response center are being processed more quickly. Chiquita Brunson, who works in the service response center at UMH, was proud of the work her team did to process service calls more quickly.



“It will impact my job directly because it will not only help with patient satisfaction, but it will also impact us to want to be here, to want to improve, to want to do more for your job and be happy to come to work. So I think it’s wonderful,” said Brunson.



Brunson, Guerrier and the 58 other participants in the leadership program each received a Process Improvement in Healthcare Certificate from UM’s business school for the high-level work they completed. Nurses also received continuing education units for the program, which are required to renew their license.



The results of the program are a testament to what can happen when frontline nurses and healthcare workers are empowered to develop solutions to challenges at their hospital. That has been one of the main goals of 1199SEIU and UMH since announcing our groundbreaking labor-management partnership in 2012, and significant progress is being made.



1199SEIU and UMH have pioneered a new way forward for labor and management to work together in a way that is lifting workers up on the journey to making UMH a world-class teaching hospital.



“It was breathtaking to be someone chosen out of thousands of people to have this opportunity to be here to explore this experience, and it’s just been breathtaking from the beginning to the end,” added Brunson.



1199SEIU and UMH are planning to collaborate on future leadership programs to continue developing leaders like Guerrier and Brunson who are prepared to tackle patient care and work-related challenges head on.