Each of us, whether we provide direct care to patients or support direct caregivers, is a member of the MaineHealth care team. And the correlation between an engaged, supported care team and superior organizational performance is well established. Health care provider organizations with higher engagement scores have higher quality scores, lower infection rates, higher safety scores, higher patient experience scores, and lower overall turnover and vacancy rates. Engagement is an operational imperative. MaineHealth must nurture a culture that enables members of the care team to perform their best; fully commit to the health system’s goals and objectives; contribute to a positive patient experience; and enhance their own well-being.

GOAL: MaineHealth will aspire to achieve top-quartile performance in nationally benchmarked measures of care team engagement.

Our team members are the most important asset in the pursuit of our mission and vision. They are the core of our success and are valued for the care they deliver, the work they perform, and the passion they demonstrate for high-quality care each day. Talent management is intensely competitive in health care, as well as in other industries. Contributing factors include labor shortages, our regions’ — and the country’s — aging population, slow population growth in our region, and a wide range of employment choices. To succeed, we must deliver
breakthrough strategies that position our health system for success. MaineHealth must invest in innovative recruitment and retention efforts while providing attractive and targeted education and training opportunities to team members through the advancement of career pathways, both internally and with external partners.

GOAL: We will exceed the national median in retention and recruitment performance through the deployment of innovative programs, with education and training experiences that advance our mission and vision.

As a prominent health care leader, MaineHealth has a responsibility to educate the next generation of health care professionals, biomedical scientists, and health services researchers to improve the health of our communities in Maine and New Hampshire. Given the growing shortage of providers in the coming decades, compounded by health disparities and an aging population with complex needs, we need to elevate our efforts in building a trained, multidisciplinary, diverse, and unified workforce to care for our patients.

It is imperative to expand upon our education programs, create a structure for interprofessional education, and systematically support our faculty so that our workforce has the training and tools needed to succeed and thrive. Breaking down silos in clinical care necessitates removing silos in education and seamlessly translating research from the bench to the bedside, all the while nurturing a culture of collaboration and curiosity. We will foster a highly skilled and interprofessional Northern New England workforce that will continue to attract and retain exceptional learners dedicated to effective, innovative solutions for exceptional care.

GOAL: MaineHealth will develop a culture of life-long learning by expanding the scale and scope of the continuum of interprofessional health education and research. 

MaineHealth’s commitment to population health improvement differentiates our system from others and forms the basis for innovative, proactive initiatives that measurably improve the health
status of individuals and communities alike. MaineHealth’s vision has supported this unique focus for two decades. The health system acknowledges the impact of a community’s environment, individual behaviors and public policy in addition to clinical care on overall health status. We must broaden our focus beyond the disease prevention and wellness strategies historically implemented and adopt actions that more deeply impact the social determinants of health and reduce health disparities.

GOAL: MaineHealth will continue to lead and collaborate in the development and implementation of disease prevention initiatives and adopt innovative strategies that measurably and positively impact the determinants of health and the overall health of our service area.

As the only academic health system in Maine, MaineHealth has a unique combination of resources, processes and alliances that enable the transformation of care delivery and biomedical research to be smarter, more responsive, more resilient and more human. External partnerships, collaboration and innovation are critical to this transformation, to promoting a culture of diversity and inclusivity, and to ultimately improving the health of our communities.

To succeed, we should be thoughtful and deliberate in engaging with our communities, fostering strategic partnerships, and enabling innovations that advance our mission. Defining these activities can be challenging, given the scale and scope of opportunities. Strategic partnerships with academic, government, industry and non-profit entities are needed to meet many shared needs, most notably a growing demand for a local workforce skilled in care delivery, clinical and research education, and biomedical research.

We aim to evolve our culture to be inclusive and innovative in our operating principles. To that end, community engagement should be a foundational element woven into the fabric of our clinical education and research training programs, as well as across all translational research initiatives. Innovation is the connective tissue to all our work, linking people, ideas, and tools together—from across MaineHealth and beyond— to solve local problems with low-cost, scalable solutions that have global relevance.

As a system, we should strive to learn from our existing relationships and innovations in order to ensure successful outcomes and replicate similar opportunities across our communities. The time is right to build organizational structures, resources, and connections to support our educators, researchers, learners and innovators across the system in revolutionizing health care delivery.

GOAL: MaineHealth will promote a culture of innovation and community engagement, and build organizational support structures to cultivate academic, industry, and community partnerships that enrich and advance our mission.