She was dynamic, excited, very well prepared and spoke easily to a rapt audience of several hundred people for more than an hour armed with an excellent video of the Games events in which she participated. After her talk she signed autographs for a large crowd of interested spectators.

On the second occasion Scotia McLeod hosted an evening with Becky Keller – 4 time Olympic medal-winning hockey player, wife, mother of two – and an MBA grad!

Its ten weeks since we returned from the Vancouver Olympics and the spirit is still high. Both recent events were packed with keen patrons of all ages. The Scotia event was smaller, more intimate, yet you could have heard a pin drop during Becky’s talk – except for the erupting laughter at her humorous accounts of training camp life.

Like Clara Hughes, Becky began her talk with video highlights of the Vancouver Games themselves along with excellent footage from her own Women’s Hockey events. It was heartening to see the excitement and the Olympic spirit that was still tangible in both venues. It was wonderful to see how well prepared the athletes were for their speaking engagements. Both video presentations were very professionally put together and the athletes themselves both warm and generous to their audiences and professionally well prepared for their gigs.

With today’s naming of John Furlong as Volunteer Chairman of the Own the Podium Advisory Board, things look good for Canadian athletes in London in 2012 and Sochi in 2014. Maybe they need volunteers in the polyclinics!

Our experiences with the Dorothy Wylie Nursing and Health Leaders Institute, now in its 10th year with over 2300 alumni, provide us with a different mental model. We believe that building leadership skills and developing leadership competence and confidence is important for every health professional. We believe leadership makes a profound difference in the quality of care patients receive. We believe that health professionals who see themselves as leaders will make a difference in every patient and family interaction.

The Leadership Institute uses Kouzes and Posner’s 5 Practices as the basis of its development programs, the keys to leadership that health professionals need to understand, value and acquire. The 5 Practices are: Model the Way; Inspire Shared Vision; Challenge the Process; Enable Others to Act and Encourage the Heart.

Good leadership is an essential ingredient in creating high quality workplaces for health professionals and safe care places for patients. Strong leadership benefits patients in a number of ways. Leaders who model the way by focusing their attention on high quality care and patient safety will create a workplace where safety consciousness is the norm. It takes leaders promoting it, and encouraging and rewarding health professionals who improve it, to make awareness of patient safety part of the fabric of patient care units.

The key to understanding the role of leadership – despite the models of generals, presidents prime ministers, and sports heroes ingrained in our consciousness – is that leaders are not just the people at the top. Leadership in the workplace needs to be much more broadly defined. It’s not an instinct some of us have and others don’t. It should be an expected part of every professional role. We have to find the level at which every health professional is comfortable leading, and then we need to grow and stretch that mark.

Professionals who feel like leaders are more likely to have the courage to stand up in an unsafe situation or take a risk and challenge the status quo when they think there is a safety risk to patients. Leadership is too important to be left to develop by chance as professionals gain experience. Instead, leadership must be an integral part of education and training and an expectation in the jobs professionals do from the beginning of their careers.

Here are some important steps for developing leaders:

• Begin leadership development at the undergraduate level. Start from the notion that every student is a potential leader by virtue of being in a program that leads to being a health professional.

• Introduce leadership concepts in lectures across the curriculum, and encourage students to use them in group projects, then emphasize them during fieldwork with mentoring and coaching to expand development.

• Explore leadership expectations during the job interview process. Employers can pose a scenario requiring leadership and ask what the candidate would do. Candidates should ask what the employer will do to support them in developing leadership skills.

• The message that leadership comes from everywhere should be part of new employee orientation. Leadership can be encouraged throughout course work and experiences can be tailored to enable professionals to take the lead, with mentoring and coaching from managers and clinical specialists.

• In practice opportunities can be provided for direct care professionals to strengthen their leadership skills (e.g., coaching them on participating effectively in multidisciplinary rounds).

• Formal and informal opportunities can be created for every professional to lead a care team, a research project and other professional activities.

• Managers, advanced practice specialists and clinical educators can support leadership development as part of daily interactions and through the performance management process.

• Experimentation and risk-taking should be recognized and rewarded (e.g., staff members who take calculated risks and make difficult decisions when help is unavailable).

• Managers can identify and appreciate the things people are doing to promote patient safety and provide meaningful recognition and rewards.

• Leaders can remember that an important part of leadership is modeling behaviour to encourage leadership in others.

• Organizations can develop a formal mentorship program that engages senior staff and proven leadership skills to set the bar and coach newer staff.

**The paper was adapted from an interview with Beverley, Julia Scott and Judith Skelton Green that appeared in the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation’s Stories for Safety.

Some days there’s no doubt in my mind that the complexity of our brave new world and all its “time saving” technology has just made it all more complicated. Other days I am so delighted with the tools that enable me to communicate with many people located all over the world, do my banking at all hours, and organize my thoughts into a neat and tidy proposal that can easily be whisked to the client across the ethernet.

Because I’ve been travelling more lately the keeping on top part of my life has taken a hit. Adding to it is the fact that I have a new Mac and I have to learn all its hidden secrets. To my delight yesterday’s Globe and Mail provided a new and interesting framework for managing my desk. The ideas come from David Allen in his Productive Living newsletter via Harvey Schachter’s Monday Morning Manager series.

The filing system looks intriguing. Instead of saying make 3 piles – do something with it, save it, trash it – as many simplistic organizing systems do, this one plumbs the depths of possibility more deeply with options like:

• I don’t need it or want it – Trash
• I still need to decide what this means to me – In Basket
• I might need to know this information – Reference Material
• I use it – Equipment and Supplies
• I like to see it – Decoration
• I’ve committed to this and need to be reminded – Project List (review weekly)
• I need to have this when I focus on a project – Support Material
• I might want to commit to this at some time in the future – Someday Maybe List
• I might want to commit to this after a specific future date – Calendar
• Its something someone else is doing that I care about – Waiting For List (review weekly)
• I need it when I do certain recurring activities – Checklist

I’m going to try this system for a few weeks and see if it helps. I’m thinking that a system like this might work on my e-files as well as my paper files. Staying on top of it all is a challenge I want to master. Maybe some of it is letting go of the idea that everything is well organized – and trusting that I will find something when I need it if it really matters. Back again to my favourite complexity truism – Trust the Process.

But we had been invited by a dear friend who is in charge of the BC Place Medical Team, and a young man we had watched grow up from his early years, to the Medals Ceremony at the stadium where it was Manitoba night.

We watched some beautiful video of Manitoba scenes, saw several very talented entertainers and then were part of the Medals Ceremonies for the days events. A chance of a lifetime, the highlight was the Canadian Women’s Bobsleigh teams accepting their Gold and Silver medals on stage with huge grins and lots of hugs. The Canadian nationalistic spirit is very high everywhere!

Organizers did a fantastic job making it a super experience for both the athletes and the audience with 4 large screens to see the athletes up close and personal, and excellent video feeds from Whistler on the medals given for events at those venues. Not a hitch in the programming or the crowd control, security lineups are very reasonable and fast moving with smiling volunteers everywhere, children are handled with great care and attention, and this is a nightly event at this and other venues involving thousands and thousands of people and hundreds of volunteers. It is all very impressive!

After the Medals Ceremony, Burton Cummings and his band blew the house down with ballads interspersed with rock and roll, Winnipeg style. He was having a ball onstage and gave an exceptional show. Thousands of people from all over the world watched and sang along. Canadians from across the country were everywhere with flags and banners, hats and scarves and tremendous national pride – we had just won Gold in Women’s Hockey against our American archrivals. So it was a party!

It was hard to get good pictures because the stadium was aglow with soft lighting and the same snowy mist that was so beautiful at the Opening Ceremonies. The glow from the crowd was just as good, too. But the stage was alight in multi colours and fantastic light show when Cummings and his team took the stage. We had the chance to be down below at stage front but were glad we chose the other option – a VIP Media Box where we could rest our weary selves and really enjoy the show. As Burton Cummings said ” It looks like when Vancouver throws a party, the whole world comes” and the crowd roared with approval.

We didn’t feel at all tired anymore as we made our way through the crowded streets to the Canada Line where more blue coated volunteers greeted us with complementary hot chocolate, there were some very orderly lineups to get on the trains and lots of happy faces – strangers talking to strangers all over the streets. Word is that The Canada Line alone is managing over 250,000 people an hour. It will be a terrific legacy for the city after it is all over.

However I remain hopeful for a more conscientious future and one of those hopeful signs is right in the Athletes Village where I go each day and see clean, large recycle bins everywhere. You don’t have to carry your banana peel or apple core very far before you can find a composting bucket with a clean –hopefully biodegradable – plastic bag inside ready to accept your offering. Beside the composting buckets is a huge drum to recycle plastic water, juice and pop bottles.

Some of the waste buckets are solar powered compactors like this one on the right.

Word is that Coke – one of the key Olympic sponsors – has a piece of equipment nearby that takes hundreds of plastic bottles and makes them into a 4x4x4 foot cube in seconds. The cubes are immediately sent to recycling plants.

Other exciting initiatives are:
• Volunteers and sponsor associates are wearing clothing made from recycled PET bottles. Each uniform contains up to 120 recycled bottles. Athletes wear t-shirts made out of recycled bottles.
• Posters, menu boards and other materials used in concessions are made out of post-consumer recycled plastic and will be recycled after the event.
• All PET containers sold during the Games will be recycled. More than 1,400 recycling bins will be available during the Olympics. Coke estimates 7 million bottles will be served during the events.
• Coke is selling its newly designed Plant Bottles comprised of up to 30 percent renewable plant-based materials made from sugar cane juice and/or molasses. Coke will produce 2 billion Plant Bottles by the end of this year.
• Coffee, tea and cocoa is available in 100% compostable packaging including lids and sleeves. Tim Hortons, Starbucks and Second Cup please take note!
• Everything in the meal tents is carefully recycled or composted. Two attendants take trays from each diner to ensure the right things go into the right bins.
• Furniture and displays at many installations are created from blue pine wood salvaged from the Mountain Pine-Beetle epidemic in BC.
• The Athletes Village has been LEEDS certified at the Platinum level and declared Most Sustainable Neighbourhood with Vancouver’s first renewable district heating system, net zero buildings that produce as much heat as they use and toilets that flush using captured rain water.

All very hopeful signs that we can do more than we think we can when we put our collective minds to it. This city is so beautiful and there are so many natural elements to its beauty, it would be a crime not to be as green as we are humanly capable of being – and continually strive for better.

We are half way through the Games and the time is flying by. The energy in the city is electric. There are people everywhere with Go Canada on clothing, on signs and flags, on cars and trucks, in store windows, and reflected in their conversation. People are talking to each other everywhere – on the streets, in the sky train, waiting at stoplights, even in the grocery store. Locals are helping visitors to get to where they want to go, offering suggestions of great things to do, asking volunteers what work they are doing, where they are from, why they chose to volunteer and what it is like.

In the Polyclinic the same excitement permeates. We have been fortunate that we haven’t had to treat anyone with any serious illnesses or injuries. Most of the work has been proactive, therapy as prevention or treatment of minor injuries, dental care, mouth guards, and optometry, a little bit of flu, coughs and colds. The most serious treatment was a cardioversion – electrotherapy for atrial fibrillation – more of a chronic condition than an emergency.

Some of the athletes are chatty when they come in. Others are quiet and thoughtful. It’s important to respect their feelings – whether they want to talk or not – and especially to honour their right to confidentiality about their health and welfare. A couple have said they were disappointed in their performance in the event – they didn’t do well, were disqualified or fell, or didn’t perform as well as they had hoped. Some have already gone home, either because they were finished their events and something was pressing at home, or because they have been “sent ” home. I’m not sure what happens there!

How difficult it must be to train for years for something that lasts only minutes and can make or break the next stage of their lives! How much leadership and courage it must take sometimes to keep going!

Each individual receives a meal ticket when they check-in for their shift each day, evening or night. Every day there are 2 meat choices and a vegetarian one, as well as soup, salad, bread and butter, a drink and dessert for each person. Coffee, tea and hot chocolate are available all day long – particularly appreciated when it’s rainy and cold.

The food isn’t spectacular and lots of people are complaining but it tastes very good when you’re hungry! Dozens of volunteers are behind the serving tables dishing up the food. The lineups are long at key times of the day – an opportunity to get to know others in different jobs in the Village. Rumor has it that the cops – paid staff not volunteers – have complained about the food and so it has improved but I haven’t seen any difference.

It’s really interesting to see that the volunteer corps represents all ages and life stages, lots from the Vancouver area as well as other parts of BC. Then there are people like us from other provinces and a few from other countries.

It has been many years since I practiced clinical nursing and worked side by side with other health professionals in the field. Here was the chance to experience this in 2010, and in a setting where many health professionals are actively working together collaboratively to meet individual patient needs.

Like other health professionals in the field today, I use terms like inter-professional practice, collaboration and team work regularly and often discuss the actualities of important current concepts like patient-focused care. This seemed like an awesome opportunity to experience the realities of what many might call “lingo”.

When my assignment first came to me in an e-mail last August I wasn’t even sure what a polyclinic was – I had to look it up on Wikipedia. A polyclinic, it said, is a place where a wide range of health care services, including diagnostics, can be obtained without the need for an overnight stay. Polyclinics are sometimes co-located within a hospital or can be located completely separated from the hospital. A typical Polyclinic houses general medical practitioners such as doctors and nurses who provide ambulatory care along with some acute care services, but lacks the major surgical and pre- and post operative care facilities commonly associated with hospitals.

Apparently polyclinics are popular in countries such as Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland and the former Soviet republics such as Russia and Ukraine and in many countries across Asia and Africa. It is said that recent Russian governments have attempted to replace the polyclinic model, which was introduced during soviet times, with a more western model but this has failed.

The concept of the polyclinic is a good fit with the current North American movement towards stronger inter-professional practice involving a wide variety of specialized practitioners and more focus on health and wellness than on illness care. In the last few years hospital units have become more like intensive care units with sicker and sicker patients requiring 24/7 care taking up available space. Hospitals are busier than ever, budgets are tight and the need for other models of care is high. The idea of community polyclinics seems valid.

As well as athletes and their friends arriving for this and that, there are many country delegations that come in to see the Operations and meet the providers and organizers of the Polyclinic. One of the groups visiting today was from the UK. I spoke with one of the doctors who is responsible for setting up the 2012 Summer Games healthcare services. He was surprised to know that we are all volunteers and very interested in our reasons for volunteering for this assignment.

We had our official photo take today by the Village photographers and videographers. It was surprising to see how many people are involved in the running of the Polyclinic on any given day. When we were asked to step outside for the photos –it was a lovely sunny afternoon in the Village – I was amazed there were so many of us. I didn’t have a chance to count but there were more than 25 people who appeared.

One of the Assessment Suites

The footprint of the clinic itself is large and people are quite spread out around the space. On any given day, there are 4 nurses, 2 admin staff, 2 doctors – one a sports med specialist – 3 physios, 2 massage, 1 chiropractor, occasionally one acupuncturist, a radiologist and 3 techs in the diagnostic imaging, 2 lab techs, 2 dentists and 3 assistants, an optometrist and several ambulance personnel. As well there are lists of on-call specialists from every discipline willing to come in to see special cases when needed – all on a volunteer basis. Next door to us is the anti-doping centre with its own staff and quite secretive operations. On the other side is the athletes’ gym.

On a humorous note, we have a basket sitting on a table between the clinic and the gym. The basket contains a variety of donated give-aways such as toothpaste and floss, hand cream, sanitizer and such, as well as condoms in red packages. Needless to say the condoms are refilled regularly. Rumor is that there were 100,000 made available to VANOC at the beginning of the Games. I know we are doing our part to go through a large share of that number!

We wanted to experience the sights and sounds. The buskers are in from all over the world and they are super – we particularly enjoyed a young South American and his excellent juggling act and then Basketball Jones who is in from New Zealand. What a skill in attracting and holding the crowd and not shy to ask for a 20 buck donation to his hat at the end! There were crowds everywhere enjoying it all on Granville St. which is closed to traffic.

We had hoped to ride the zipline but the wait was 4 hours. Sure looked fun though!

On the way home on a very crowded skytrain we learned that it was also a day of celebrations for Chinese New Year and a welcome to the Year of the Tiger which made the city doubly crowded and doubly excited on a sunny Vancouver day in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. We felt fortunate to be part of it all.