Partnership focuses on career advancement
CHILLICOTHE – Ohio University-Chillicothe over the next year will be “cutting its teeth” in a new partnership with Adena Health System that may expand in the future to help develop the next generation of leadership for major area employers.
“This thing with Adena is basically the first time we’ve ever done something like this,” said OU-C Dean Martin Tuck. “I think this is something that we can really do with other organizations. We’ve talked with the prison system, they have a lot of individuals in their organization that have some college or maybe have an associate degree but they really would like them to have a bachelor’s degree, particularly if they want to move them into management and leadership positions, and that’s exactly what we’re doing with Adena.”
The academic degree completion program that begins this fall through the partnership with Adena is designed to help health system employees obtain the skills and bachelor’s degrees necessary to make a move into management and leadership positions. It is a hybrid program that pulls material from three more rigidly structured existing bachelor’s degree programs offered at OU-C in applied management, health services administration and technical and applied studies.
“As an organization, we invest in development – staff, leadership and physicians,” said Gail Games, Adena Health System chief learning officer. “We work to address gaps in our leadership team both internally and externally. When Dean Tuck and I started talking about ways to fill in those gaps and prepare Adena’s future leaders, the idea of a customized program evolved.”
Tuck said in his experience speaking with local employers, there is a growing need to develop the next generation of leadership.
“A lot of organizations, and Adena is one of them, they want to grow from within,” Tuck said. “I kind of saw that at Adena, out at Kenworth it’s kind of the same way, and I think that’s a trend. They want to get people and they’ll identify them as good people and they want to grow within. I think if you want to do that, a lot of times you have to have these kinds of partnerships and these kind of programs to be able to make that work.”
OU-C has been partnering with Adena in some respects, having seen its first class of students graduate from the an accelerated bachelor’s degree nursing program conducted at Adena’s Paccar Medical Education Center and utilizing Adena clinical sites and instructors for the college’s nursing program.
The relationship between the two organizations formed the jumping off point for creation of the new program. Adena informed OU-C that it was looking for a way to help employees develop leadership, management and interview skills and the coordinators of the campus’ health care programs working with campus officials began creating a curriculum that would meet those needs. Then came the recruitment process, conducting informational sessions and setting up tables with information where health system employees could access it in order to gauge the interest from prospective students. About 100 expressed an initial interest, but how many of those will follow through with participation has yet to be determined.
The program was designed to be flexible for participants to work around their jobs, with plans calling for some online work and classes on six Saturdays this fall at the Paccar Medical Education Center worth six college credits.
The beauty of the program, according to program coordinator Donna Burgraff, is its potential for meeting future community needs.
“The hope is, in the future, that other area employers will approach us and share their needs, as did Adena Health System, and we can again see what we can do to offer a program that is tailored to meet their needs,” Burgraff said.
In that regard, Tuck said officials expect to learn a lot from the current effort.
“We’re kind of cutting our teeth with Adena – in a way, they’re kind of an experiment – but they’ve been so enthusiastic about this and we’ve been enthusiastic, so I see ourselves over the next year or so focusing on this,” Tuck said. “There’s going to be bugs that we’re going to have to work out, but once we do that, we want to maybe take it to different organizations, large organizations like the prison system or maybe Glatfelter or Kenworth, to see if we can tailor-make some programs for those businesses like we did for Adena.”