Parking September 2010 - 59

Top left – Robert Baer, director of Parking & Transportation at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Medical Center, receives his Intermediate Improvement Science Seminar (I2S2) diploma from CEO and President of CCHMC, James Anderson. Bottom left – Andy Glock, visitor parking coordinator, CCHMC, gives direction to a valet and traffic director.

telephone surveys by an outside research company showed that 17 percent of first-time visitors responded that visitor parking was “Not very convenient” or “Not convenient at all.”

Training
In January 2009, we were selected to participate in the hospital’s largest class of I2S2. Our department was one of the first non-clinical areas to participate in this new effort. Over the next six months, we would work side by side with surgeons, medical doctors, residents, advance practice nurses, clinical directors and other clinical leaders on our projects for improvement. Our project “Aim” was to achieve a 50 percent reduction in the percentage of respondents answering “Not convenient at all” and “Not very convenient” to the question “Rate how convenient it was for you to park.” Our work throughout the course also included off-site meetings, presentations on progress, book reports, tests of change and many other exercises.

Collecting Data
The first thing we learned in I2S2 was the importance of data collection and establishing a baseline or median for the measure you are trying to improve. How can we fix visitor parking satisfaction, or any system, if we do not know the data and where we are right now? We weren’t sure what we were looking for in the data. So we began tracking any measure we could think of: vacant spaces, the number of failed attempts to park, number of daily clinic appointments, same day surgeries and daily census. We even went so far as to analyze verbatim responses from families dissatisfied with parking. We have kept meticulous track of this data and recorded it all on charts and graphs for regular updates with our clinicians.

Several years ago, senior leadership introduced a scientific methodology for improving, and clinicians began participating in an Intermediate Improvement Science Seminar (I²S²). Since the inception of these classes, nurses and doctors have successfully used these new methods for improving to significantly reduce serious patient safety events, to reduce the number of ventilator acquired pneumonias, and to improve many other processes. We decided if we were going to get any respect and make improvements, we needed to speak the same language and use the same scientific approach that all the clinicians were using. It was time for us to jump right into the foray with our parking issues. We had our work cut out for us. Not only was visitor parking receiving negative attention for impacting flow within the medical center, but our customer satisfaction ratings needed to improve. Ongoing

Test of Change
Like most veteran parking operators, we had some gut feelings on what the possible solutions were to addressing the visitor parking situation; however, we were not entirely certain what the answer was. Additionally, we needed the clinicians and other hospital leadership to understand what we were dealing with and to gain some confidence in our abilities. This led us to testing things like a valet stack and pack, and mailing out informational brochures to
www.npapark.org PARKING September 2010

Parking September 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Parking September 2010