COLLABORATION WILL BE KEY
The Ottawa Hospital’s Dr. Jack Kitts believes the next generation of leaders in health care will be collaborators, writes Craig Dowden.
Dr. Jack Kitts, 60, oversees 12,000 employees and an annual budget of $1.2 billion as the chief executive of The Ottawa Hospital (TOH), which serves more than one million people.
Kitts was born and raised in a family with nine children in Barry’s Bay, about two hours west of Ottawa. His father died suddenly when he was 16. Later on, a guidance counsellor convinced him to go to Ottawa to finish his Grade 13 equivalent. He went on to earn his medical degree from the University of Ottawa in 1980 and completed a fellowship in anesthesiology at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1988.
He was the anesthesia department chief at the Civic Hospital in Ottawa in 1995 and in 1998 he was appointed vice-president of medical affairs in the newly merged Ottawa Hospital. He graduated with an executive master’s of business administration from the University of Ottawa in 2001 and became the TOH’s CEO in October 2001 and president in February 2002. At the time, the hospital was going through a lot of upheaval, following the dismissal of the former CEO and board of directors.
Since then, it has become one of the largest and most successful research and teaching hospitals in Canada. It received $27 million in new grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the federal funding agency for health research, this year and was ranked as the seventh-best research hospital in the country, by Toronto-based Research Infosource Inc. in November 2015.
In October, Kitts will be awarded the Trudeau Medal, the highest honour given by the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management to its alumni.
Kitts lives with his wife Lian and their three children in Ottawa. He spoke to the Financial Post about his medical career, his move into management and how the hospital has changed since he took over as CEO.
Q The Ottawa Hospital has undergone a significant and successful transformation during your tenure as CEO. Can you comment on that journey?
A In 1998, the province merged four hospitals (Ottawa General, the Civic, the Riverside and the Grace) and two programs (the Rehabilitation Centre and the Psychiatric Emergency Services from the Royal Ottawa Hospital) into TOH. And by 2001, the hospital had accumulated a massive debt, morale was low and there were concerns about the quality of patient care. In an unprecedented move at the time, the CEO and the board of directors were dismissed. I became the CEO in October 2001. And in 2004, the Ottawa Regional Cancer Centre also merged with TOH. Those early years were particularly challenging for everyone.
My first order of business was to build a high-performing leadership team. We needed to improve our operations, finances, staff morale and ensure our patients received quality care. I don’t imagine many CEOs would say this … but it was important to become average and build from there.
By 2008, we were an equal among our peers and the following year we set a goal to provide world-class service with the compassion that we’d want for a loved one.
Q What motivated your pivot to embracing a more ambitious vision statement?
A It was a letter I received in 2007 from the husband of a patient who fractured her hip that summer. He said she’d received the required treatment but that her experience during her hospital stay was unacceptable. He clearly demonstrated that although we’d become very good at diagnosing and treating people, we weren’t very good at caring for them. This letter helped me realize that we had somehow lost the human connection.
Today, we begin every patient interaction with a personal touch, and both the quality of care is better and the patient experience is much better.
Q How did you get people on board?
A We had to communicate our vision to patients and the public. And we had to address staff concerns with excessive workloads. We spent a year meeting with front-line staff to better understand their responsibilities and workload challenges. We did everything possible to ensure that we weren’t asking our staff to do something unreasonable. We agreed that at TOH, you couldn’t be too busy to care.
Staff were encouraged to speak up if they felt their workload prevented them from caring for their patients. They were also encouraged to raise it with me if they felt their managers didn’t understand. Some of the staff even took me up on my offer to walk a shift in their shoes. In some cases, we needed to change procedures and add resources. But in most cases, we needed to be reminded that a smile or kind gesture goes a long way in making the patient experience much better.
Of the thousands of patient letters I’ve received over the years, every one of them, good or bad, speaks to the attitude and behaviour of the staff. And I make a point of sharing each and every letter with the clinical unit and the staff involved.
Q What have you learned about what it takes to be a successful CEO?
A At the time of my appointment, I was an anesthesiologist, not an executive, and I’m also an introvert who prefers to lead from behind, so I really needed to understand what makes CEOs successful and gain the confidence to be a leader.
The most important factors for me are: 1) Being supported by highly skilled and motivated executive teams; 2) Good interpersonal skills for collaborating and integrating; 3) The ability to inspire people so all of the staff knows their role in working toward a compelling vision.
Q What will leadership look like in the future?
A I believe collaboration is the new competition. The next generation of leaders will need to be great collaborators and integrators and break down the silos in health care. Futurists predict there will be more changes in health care in the next 10 years than there were in the first 200. It’s an exciting time to be a leader in health care.
Q What major lesson you have learned?
A A critical and often overlooked success factor is the support of your “home team.” I wouldn’t have been as successful without my family. Everyone needs a safe place where you can share your issues and insecurities — and not be judged.
Q How do you balance work and family?
A Shortly after I became CEO, I attended my son’s peewee hockey game. I was fixated on my BlackBerry and missed a great game, including his overtime goal to win the tournament. Afterwards, I asked myself whether the emails were so important that I couldn’t watch the game. I decided to change and today I know that to be a successful CEO, you don’t have to work 16 hour days, or seven days a week. I choose my evening activities and events very carefully and most of my weekends are with my family.
I try to keep my workday to 10 hours and my workweek to 50 hours. You can’t be your best if you don’t take care of yourself.