Webinar: Chief Quality Officers: Preparing the Healthcare Workforce to Lead-Preparing the Healthcare Workforce to Lead

Video Transcription

Video Summary

Stephanie Mercado (NACU CEO) moderates a panel with Chief Quality Officers from three very different organizations: Nicklaus Children’s Health System in Miami (Randy Harmatz), MedStar Health in the DC/Baltimore region (Roland “Terry” Fairbanks), and Milford Regional Medical Center in Massachusetts (Bert Thurlow-Walsh). They describe how quality is structured (often including patient safety, infection prevention, risk, analytics, and equity) and emphasize that quality cannot operate in isolation from other functions.<br /><br />A major theme is the disconnect between leadership perceptions of safety culture and frontline experience. Panelists stress that communication and trust depend on visible leadership presence and, especially, middle managers modeling “just culture” daily. Tactics include executive leader walk rounds and board “immersion days” that put board members in frontline settings.<br /><br />On convening across silos, Harmatz shares examples where quality served as a neutral facilitator—bringing ED and radiology together to solve turnaround-time and ordering conflicts, and aligning clinical teams with legal/risk concerns around sepsis. Milford implemented daily safety huddles and post-huddles focused on complex/long-stay patients, improving discharge throughput.<br /><br />Finally, they link quality to finance: high-quality, safe care supports compliance and reimbursement, “protects revenue,” reduces waste, and improves workforce retention—an often overlooked financial impact.

Keywords

healthcare quality management

patient safety culture

chief quality officer panel

just culture leadership

executive walk rounds

board immersion days

cross-silo collaboration

quality and financial performance