Fox Chase CNO Anna Liza Rodriguez Shares Experience on Creating Structures for Leadership Accountability

PHILADELPHIA (April 27, 2021)—Anna Liza Rodriguez, MSN, MHA, RN, OCN, NEA-BC, chief nursing officer and vice president for Nursing and Patient Services at Fox Chase Cancer Center, has created a process that allows leaders to recognize variations in their performance and create a mechanism by which they can review, report on their action plan, and highlight their best practices.

Rodriguez presented the information in a poster at the 46^th Annual ONS Congress™. “The impetus in doing this was the fact that there really was no reporting structure, and there was a variation in the focus of the leaders in terms of monitoring the departmental focus of what the institutional goals are,” she said.

Rodriguez said the structure for her process involves several steps for meeting performance goals. These include identifying a set day and time for departmental reporting on metrics and standardizing the meeting structure with a set agenda and format.

Leaders could then compare the department’s performance against its expectations using what she calls key practice indicators. These include metrics such as patient satisfaction, employee engagement and retention rates, patient discharges and length of stay, readmission rates, and several others. Leaders could then collaborate with others to highlight best practices and develop methods for improvement.

“The group discussion is really valuable because it engages the team to collectively brainstorm on other possible tactics that were used really well in other departments that they can apply in their area,” said Rodriguez.

Since implementing a monthly leadership key performance indicator report, improvements were made in areas including labor productivity, nursing staff retention rates, patient satisfaction for both medical and outpatient practices, employee engagement, safety culture, and nursing survey scores, she said.

“We saw that there was an increase in local leadership accountability for their performance, and it also ensured cancer center leadership had consistent awareness of the challenges or barriers that leaders are experiencing in meeting those goals,” said Rodriguez.

She completed the research for the poster while working at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, a National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Rodriguez joined Fox Chase in January of 2021. She has been a member of ONS for several years and is a part of the ONS Leadership Development Committee.

“The value of participating in ONS congress is that it gives a spotlight to the institution for which an individual is working. It really elevates an individual participating in terms of sharing their best practice nationally,” said Rodriguez. “I hope to encourage many of our staff and leaders to also continue to submit abstracts in national conferences so we can highlight the great work that we have here at Fox Chase.”

Rodriguez’s poster, “Leadership Accountability Reporting: Driving and Sustaining Change While Empowering Your Leaders,” is available on the ONS congress website.