Leadership Retreat

I attended a training retreat Sunday, Monday and Tuesday for my Health Leadership Fellows class. The retreat focused on compelling story telling and featured presentations and demonstrations by two nationally recognized masters of the art, Doug Lipman and Evelyn Clark. They taught us the power of storying telling as a management tool, using stories about our agencies and missions to stimulate listeners’ interest. If you can convince an audience to embrace your story, you’ve won over a supporter. We learned how to share our corporate narratives, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what our mission is and how we relate to the community, with others. I found the retreat very informative. Again, I want to thank the Health Foundation for Western and Central New York for creating the Health Leadership Fellows Program and the STHCS Board of Directors for giving me the opportunity to participate in the program.

Rural Health Council

It seems I’ve spent every other day driving to or from a conference or meeting. I was also in Albany Thursday for the New York State Rural Health Council meeting. Agenda items included addressing health disparities and promoting health equity and the State Health Innovation Plan Workforce Workgroup. We also discussed the importance of integrating primary health care and behavioral health care to achieve the state’s health-care reform goals. I want to thank Office of Rural Health Director Karen Madden for her insight and support as we work to help our member agencies achieve the triple aim of better health, better care and lower costs.