As a caregiver employed by UMass Memorial Health Care, you’ll soon be invited – along with more than 13,000 caregivers from across the health care system – to participate in the 2018 Caregiver Survey if you were hired before January 16, 2018. This year’s survey will be open for your response from April 16 to May 7.

The results from our previous surveys have been instrumental in helping us set system, entity and department level priorities aimed at improving the UMass Memorial caregiver experience. What I would most like to learn from this year’s survey is how well you feel leadership in your area listens to you and works with you to solve the problems that you face in your department or unit. I also want to know if you feel that you are treated with respect by the leadership team in your work area and by the organization as a whole.

We are a safety net health care system that takes care of the poorest and least well insured patients in the region. We also provide significant financial support to the state’s only public medical school. These commitments create resource constraints, especially in the areas of space, equipment and staffing, that other health systems just don’t have. I think most of you understand this and it may even be part of the reason you chose to work here. But listening to our caregivers and treating everyone with respect everyday, no matter what resource constraints we face, is something we must deliver on – and if we are not doing this well, please let us know how we can do better as you share additional feedback in the open-ended items of the survey.

This year’s survey combines our engagement survey items with additional items focusing on safety culture and nursing excellence as a “one ask” survey. This means that if you’ve had to complete multiple surveys in the past, you’ll now only receive one survey addressing the areas applicable to your entity and role.

A link and randomly generated password to access the web-based survey will be sent directly to survey-eligible employees from Press Ganey, our survey vendor, on Monday, April 16. Remember that this survey is confidential, which means your individual responses will not be seen by anyone at UMass Memorial. Our organization will only receive a summary of the results at the entity and department levels. Based on these results, your team will develop an action plan to implement positive changes that impact your everyday work.

I look forward to hearing from you through this upcoming survey and to what we will accomplish together in the year ahead.

Thank you in advance for taking the survey and for taking great care of our patients and one another.

Eric