Especificación de estándares de programación

As this MPH degree from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has a focus on public health leadership, it connects well with the idea that visionary leadership and guidance is a significant component of each ACH. These strong leadership characteristics should be integrated within the overall structure of CMS, the HCA, all nine ACHs, and subsequently each stakeholder and community to ensure ACH priorities create lasting change. As evident in the body of this paper, ACHs are a relatively new approach for integrating clinical and social services to provide a whole person approach to improve health outcomes, increase care, and lower costs. This goal requires comprehensive planning and engagement from multiple partners to create streamlined projects and resources that address varying gaps within regional areas. Though ACHs are divided into regions to ensure that each ACH has a narrower scope for addressing health outcomes, an added complexity is that within regions there can be varying degrees of health outcomes, gaps in health and social services, as well as different behavioral challenges. Each ACH organization requires sustained resources and engagement across multiple sectors for many years to monitor health outcomes and truly affect change. With all of this in mind, ACH leadership will need to create an

environment that fosters collaboration as ACH goals evolve throughout various phases of each project’s life cycle. A leader who can bring together stakeholders who are subject matter experts in different fields and align those varying perspectives into one streamlined approach by creating a shared vision is a critical component of this framework.

26" " Accountability, Communication, and Transparency

To create a cohesive ACH team, leaders will need to create a framework that fosters accountability, communication, and transparency among stakeholders. To achieve this goal, clearly defined roles and expectations of stakeholders, partners, and the community should be developed in the early stages of each ACH to ensure that initial connections and interest does not waver throughout the process. Furthermore, a communication plan that encourages transparency between ACHs and the greater community is important in maintaining community and partner engagement. In addition, this communication plan should also encourage stakeholders to talk freely within the ACH to ensure that each partner feels integrated and informed of decisions and strategies. A misaligned communication plan can easily cause ineffective programs, result in redundant work, as well as create burnout from partners if meetings and resources cannot move forward because the meetings are constantly revolving around the same issues that were already addressed previously. Internal communication within the partners and stakeholders of an ACH will be critical pieces of a leader’s responsibility but a leader should also take advantage of the other eight ACHs and all of the knowledge and subject matter experts within each one.

Leadership

Leaders should be open minded and be committed to communicating with the leaders of other ACHs in discussions that are framed around information sharing for best practices,

guidelines, and lessons learned. By creating synergy and coordination among ACHs, leaders can ensure that ACHs are working succinctly to address common barriers as well as utilize solutions that have worked well for others so that each ACH doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. If ACHs remain coordinated at a high level, this will also help create degrees of standardization across regions and priorities which can help inform the development of ACHs across the nation as well

as provide standard metrics and tools that the local, state and federal government can use to assess ACH development.

Clearly defined roles and transparent communication will surely increase the likelihood of engagement and longevity of ACH stakeholders. An effective ACH leader will also be an individual who can provide a clear vision of the mission and overall vision of each ACH, which is especially important in contexts that require stakeholders to continuously adapt within

complex and uncertain environments (Kelly, 2011). This requires that the leader be a visionary who can instill inspiration in each partner and stakeholder. This is a critical role of an ACH leader and will also ensure that individual competition among stakeholders does not stand in the way of true progress. Since many organizations and groups may never have worked together in such an integrated capacity in the past, the leader will need to create an overall strategic vision and shared understanding to align each individual stakeholder to a common purpose by

articulating how involvement is linked to each participant, encourage stakeholders to be involved in the planning process, and build mutual trust (Yukl, 2010).

One metric to assess the degree to which a leader is successful in creating a unified vision can be measured by how well the ACH achieves consensus and multi-sectorial buy-in for the regional health improvement projects. Clearly with so many dynamic players, a leader will need to align the ACH’s strategic mission and vision with other leaders in the ACH who can provide other functional roles such as facilitation, assessment, planning and project management. Thus, a leader who can rally supporting personnel who are engaged counterparts and champions for the team will be well positioned for success.

28" " CHAPTER VI