Now is the time to follow-up on those good intentions of yours to make sure your swine flu/pandemic illness policy is all that is should be. Things are calming down a bit (although US numbers are rising, cases are mild) and as we might have a bit of calm before the next storm, it is the ideal time to give yourself a policy and training check-up while the topic is fresh.
- Do you have a policy for dealing with a community illness that is more than your typical flu season?
- Does your policy include detailed information that most anyone in your organization could follow if you were not able to give directions?
- Do you know what the local hospitals’ plans and policies are?
- Have you clarified roles for each of your clinical and administrative staff and provided them with detailed information on their responsibilities during a community illness?
- Do you understand what your practice is required to do to report information to local, state and national authorities?
- Have you located resources for or designed patient education materials appropriate for your population?
- Have you integrated community illness information into your new employee orientation and your annual staff training materials?
If you answered “no” or “maybe” to any of the questions above, here are some resource links to help you (more…)
Most of us have heard that interviewers make up their minds about applicants in the first minutes, or even seconds of an interview. But what about once the applicant has been hired, or even once an employee has been with us for several years? Do we base our beliefs on an employee’s ability to take on a new challenge or improve their performance on something real, or things we believe to be real?
New research shows that managers with a fixed view of people’s attributes tend to “ignore improvements or deterioration in the performance of their staff, and are also less likely to ensure they receive the training they need.” The research findings, reported on the British Psychological Society Research Digest Blog, are as follows:
One study, for example, gave managers negative background information about a fictional employee before they were shown that same person performing well at a negotiation task. Managers with a fixed view of personal attributes (they tended to agree with statements like “As much as I hate to admit it, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. People can’t change their deepest attributes”) subsequently rated the employee less positively than managers with a belief that people can change.
Another study found that managers who think people’s attributes are fixed gave their staff less coaching, presumably because they think such interventions will be ineffective.
The good news is that once managers become aware of these findings, they can change their minds about employees being able to change and improve! Read the article here.
