What I am working on this week

This week I am busy working on/completing a lot of policy work.

• I am finishing up work on a policy piece I have been working on since November
• This is a policy that involves safety proceedures for certain types of medical instruments
• Tomorrow I will be attending a briefing note training session as research for my briefing note Lean process
• I want to see if this training is adequate and can be offered to all new staff tasked with writing briefing notes
• This action would be consistent with the results I received from the briefing note survey I created that overwhelmingly indicated that Executive Director's would support briefing note training for new employees
• I am making a power-point presentation on health system priorities for Connecting the Dots, which is a health system-wide discussion/planning forum
• I'm also working on some research for the Saskatchewan Surgical Initiative

I am busy, busy, busy!

Cancer Agency Tour

Last week, the Deputy Minister and I went to the Cancer Agency for a visit. We attended their senior leadership team meeting, and chatted with the CEO, Chair and Vice-Chair of the Agency.

We mainly talked about their preventative screening programs. One of their programs in particular has been very successful in the pilot phase and is set to expand. The earlier cancer is detected, the better the outcomes will be for the patient.

I think my favourite part of the internship is going out into the community and listening to health providers and patients. Listening to their concerns as well as what pleases them is invaluable when creating policy.

Briefing Note Lean

I have been working a lot on the briefing note Lean project lately and thought I would post our progress:

• "BN Requested" in email headers has been utilized as a means to clearly and quickly identify requests to writers
• Paper requests for briefing notes have been eliminated - all requests will be made electronically
• Paper approvals have been eliminated by 75% - now only one final package of the briefing note needs to be sent to the Deputy Minister's Office.
• Prior to this paper packages were also sent to the Minister's Office, Communications Branch, and the branch that initiated the note - now, they all get a notification electronically of final approval
• Under the old system if a note was rejected and sent back for rework new packages needed to be created, which wasted a lot of time, effort, and paper. 
• Tracking of briefing notes from the three branches with the most over-due briefing notes has been undertaken to give us better insight into hold-ups
• A survey was sent out to the Assistant Deputy Ministers and Executive Directors asking them to identify problems with the briefing note process in terms of timeliness and quality of notes.

We are also considering utilizing a fully electronic process from request to final approval for the briefing notes. Right now the system is paper based, which isn't very helpful if you want to track where a briefing note is in the process!