Dr. Mahfuz Hoq earned his bachelor of medicine and surgery from Dhaka Medical College, University of Dhaka and master of public health in epidemiology from the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University. He held multiple roles at Bridgeport Hospital/ Yale New Haven Health — most recently serving as interim vice president and medical director of performance, safety, quality and regulatory affairs. Today, Dr. Hoq is vice president of medical affairs and chief medical officer at Augusta Health.
Augusta Health engaged NAHQ to assess their workforce against the NAHQ Healthcare Quality Competency Framework and then customized a professional development plan across the organization.
How do you expect to incorporate the framework structure into the quality management system at Augusta Health?
MH: Augusta Health aspires to be a national model for community care with a mission to strengthen the health and well-being of all people in our communities by providing highly reliable care. To achieve this, workforce competency must be developed. Incorporating the validated NAHQ Healthcare Quality Competency Framework into our quality management system brings team member alignment with the high reliability goal.
What are the strategic advantages of including NAHQ Professional Development at your organization?
MH: In my experience, the challenge of any aspiring goal is keeping the organizational culture intact and consistent over time. People will always come and go, retire or change roles. How do we help each new person align with the institutional goals? The NAHQ Healthcare Quality Competency Framework provides a strategic advantage by offering the consistency of a common understanding across the organization over time despite changes in roles. It enables team members to speak the same language as we incorporate the framework for hospital team member roles and existing initiatives.
Additionally, we are welcoming graduate medical education (GME) to Augusta Health in 2024. This presents an opportunity for us to teach consistency and protocols, not only in the delivery of medical care, but also in the qualitative safety aspect. It is a big deal to bring a new GME program such as this to the organization. We appreciate the uniformity the framework will provide for GME program leadership and residents.
How are you leveraging the NAHQ Workforce Accelerator solution throughout Augusta Health?
MH: The upskilling plans are a core part of Augusta Health’s professional development strategy. To create future quality trainers, we selected team members from different corners of the organization who contribute to quality in a variety of ways. They will develop a common understanding and speak the same language, hoping to give back to their respective area and expose the workforce to the same concepts. In this way, quality will evolve from limited roles in the organization to a discipline everyone can contribute to. This needs to evolve in a generative fashion. Everyone needs to upskill as the challenges of a limited workforce and resources persist.
How has engagement with NAHQ helped make your upcoming strategic initiatives achievable?
MH: The strategic initiative today is about transformation. I’m not talking about cutting the budget or cutting positions, either. We are talking about care redesign. For that, the workforce requires another set of skills. As an industry, we know that quality cannot be an afterthought; it has to part of every department, the culture, personal safety and patient safety. What NAHQ brings to the table are validation tools that enable healthcare team members to better understand how they can impact quality in the continuum of care. Competency through validation is how we achieve a generative environment for high reliability. The NAHQ Workforce Accelerator supports advancing the cultural maturity for our strategic priorities of high reliability in keeping with the organizational mission and aspirations.
Why is NAHQ a critical component of safe and effective healthcare delivery in all facets of the continuum?
MH: NAHQ provides us a valuable tool. The partnership and resources NAHQ integrate, along with the tool, supports the evolutionary thinking needed to help us meet the challenges we are facing in the industry and positions us to lead quality and patient safety for our community as a national model for community-based healthcare.
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To learn more: NAHQ.org/Accelerator_August