Geoffrey Crampton, VP HR and Organization Development, Fraser Health Authority
by Laurel Hyatt
The Fraser
Health Authority is one of six health authorities established by the government of British Columbia in December 2001. It provides health care to 1.4 million people—about one-third of B.C.’s population—in the Fraser Valley and the eastern suburbs of Vancouver.
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Geoffrey Crampton
Fraser Health Authority
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Fraser Health provides services ranging from acute care hospitals to home health, mental health, and public health services. The authority also provides more than 7,000 community-based residential care beds and is committed to adding 1,100 assisted living units by 2006.
It adds up to a unique challenge to serve so many people in such a large and diverse area. But it’s a challenge that’s welcomed by Geoffrey Crampton, Fraser Health’s Vice President, Human Resources and Organization Development. Workplace Today spoke to him from his office in Surrey, B.C.
WT:
The first question I wanted to ask you about is to get a sense of just how big an organization the Fraser Health Authority is. You have more than 20,000 employees, 2,000 physicians, and you serve 1.4 million people. Does this make you one of the largest employers in the Vancouver area that you know of?
GC:
Yes it does. Fraser Health employs approximately 8,500 nurses, 3,000 paramedical professionals, 6,500 facility/support people, and 1,000 in the community sector. The other number that you might be interested in is that our annual operating budget is approximately $1.6 billion per year.
WT:
That’s amazing. To do HR for that many people, do you have an HR person on site at every facility?
GC:
We have one or more HR consultants assigned for each of the communities that we serve. While they may be physically located at a hospital, they have responsibility for HR right across the community: acute care, extended care, public health, long-term care, mental health—all of those programs within a community are supported by the HR consultants and that reflects the way our overall delivery of health care is managed within Fraser Health.
We have very much an integrated health delivery system where all of our programs are managed by either health service directors or health service administrators who are responsible for programs across the continuum of health care in a community.
WT:
Keeping with the theme of HR management and governance, I understand the health authority itself is governed by a board of directors made up of community members.
GC:
That’s correct. They’re actually all appointed by government and they are lay members; they’re not health care professionals, they are people from the community.
WT:
And the board has three different committees and one of them handles governance and human resources?
GC:
That’s correct, yes.
WT:
How much of a say does that committee have in setting HR policies or making HR decisions?
GC:
The board is very clear in its mandate, which is to be a board of governors as distinct from management. So they’re very much involved with policy issues and policy direction, but not in the day-to-day management of our implementation of those policies.
For example, we have spent a fair number of days compiling a three-year strategic plan where the board has been very much involved in the development of the key components. One of the key pillars of that plan is people development and we have developed a number of goals and priorities and major initiatives which the board has been involved in. In the very near future we’ll have that plan finalized and then it will be approved by the board. Their role is to help establish that strategic direction and then it’s up to the executive team to make sure that we implement successfully that vision, that direction.
WT:
Do you report to that committee at all? I don’t mean in a responsibility sense, but just in more of a communications sense.
GC:
That’s right. I attend those meetings—it’s a subcommittee of the board—and I participate in the discussion. I don’t report to the board as such; I report to the CEO and the CEO is the only person who formally reports to the board.
WT:
Getting onto more of the HR issues that you face, what would you say is the authority’s biggest HR challenge right now?
GC:
The whole issue of retaining and recruiting knowledge workers, given our demographics and given the many other employment opportunities that are available. The biggest challenge for us is to retain and recruit the health care professionals we need to meet the needs of our growing population and to replace the people who we know are just about to retire over the next three to seven years.
WT:
What is the authority doing about that?
GC:
We have some quite aggressive recruitment programs. We also believe that one of the keys to our success will be implementing the people development part of our strategic plan where we will really underscore the fact that managers and directors will be key retention officers. They will be the key components in retaining the people that we have, recruiting the people that we need, and creating an organizational culture which sees change as an opportunity for growth and an opportunity for making changes to the way that we deliver care.
Rather than seeing change as a hurdle, we see change as an opportunity. That organizational culture of embracing change and constant learning, combined with our managers and directors understanding their role as a major retention force within the organization, is going to help us meet our challenges.
WT:
Getting back to what you were saying about the front line managers taking responsibility for recruitment, I think for quite a while there’s been an assumption that that’s the HR department’s job. It sounds to me as if you’re saying, “Well, no, it’s the managers on the front line who also need to take responsibility for that.” Is that another way of putting it?
GC:
Yes. We certainly can help and our role is to support managers in their retention and recruitment activities. I deliberately say retention and recruitment because it’s in that order of priority that we want to retain the people we have and then recruit the people we need for the future.
WT:
That makes sense. Why start from scratch with somebody new? And of course a big factor in both recruitment and retention is compensation, which leads me to my next question about what happened last year when the B.C. government announced a province-wide $392 million increase for physician compensation, which made the province’s doctors among the highest paid in Canada. Does that only apply to doctors with independent practices who bill medicare or would it also apply to the doctors who are your actual employees?
GC:
We have very few physicians who are employees. The $392 million applies to all physicians in B.C.
WT:
I haven’t heard the word “brain drain” for quite some time. I don’t know if it’s still a problem or not but you’re fairly close to the American border. Do you lose staff to the U.S.?
GC:
It’s certainly not uncommon for people to go and work in the States. But I think what almost always happens is it’s a relatively short-term phenomenon where they for lifestyle reasons return to Canada. Certainly there will always be people who choose to go to work in the States or elsewhere for that matter. But I don’t think that it’s a major phenomenon right now.
There are some areas where it’s more prevalent than in others. The pharmacists who have graduated each year from the University of British Columbia are certainly courted and wooed by American employers and we do have some nurses who choose to go work in the States but as I say, over time it’s quite common for them to return to Canada, so it’s certainly not a major phenomenon.
WT:
The authority recently faced a health emergency—I think it’s fair to call it that—with the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome. How did the authority respond and what role did the HR department play in that?
GC:
We had a number of different responses. The health authority put into place its emergency operations plan, which is intended for exactly these kinds of situations. So we had an emergency operations centre with an incident commander and specific roles assigned to various individuals.
Within the HR world, it meant essentially going into 24/7 round the clock coverage with our occupational health and infection control folks. We also had to expand our employee and family assistance program (EFAP) coverage. What we did was—particularly at the change of shifts at 7 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon and 7 in the evening and 11 at night—to have our occupational health, infection control, and EFAP advisors available and actively reminding people about the protocols and encouraging them to talk about the issues and their concerns. Then of course there was confidential employee counselling services available as per usual off-site and by phone.
It was very much a major event in our life. Because of the way the health authorities are now structured—we have the full spectrum, everything from public health to acute care—it was a unique opportunity to make sure that we had an integrated delivery and an integrated approach to a health care crisis rather than having four or five different operating entities trying to be involved in managing a situation.
WT:
So did you feel that emergency operations plan served you well during the SARS outbreak or was there anything you thought afterwards, “Maybe we could do a little tweaking to make it better?”
GC:
The answer to both of those questions is yes. It certainly did serve us well and it gave us a structure and a framework that was very much needed. People, because of preplanning and tabletop exercises, had an understanding of what the framework and what the protocols were.
We did very much learn some lessons and we had a day-long debriefing recently and had several other half-day debriefings in various locations and with different groups to identify lessons learned and to determine how we would do things differently in the future. It has certainly been a great learning exercise in terms of how we might want to deal with a pandemic flu outbreak or West Nile virus, for example.
WT:
I assumed that you would have such a plan in place. A lot of employers outside of the health care field don’t. I think this SARS incident has made a lot of people perk up and notice, “Gee, we’d better be ready for these kinds of things,” no matter what industry you’re in.
GC:
The other thing that I definitely want to underscore is from day one we sat down with our union representatives and our local stewards and chairpersons of the local units and had just a complete 100% cooperation with the nurses’ union and the hospital employees’ union. We simply had outstanding cooperation in jointly identifying issues and finding solutions to the issues. There’s no doubt in my mind that a huge part of our success in dealing with this situation is attributed to that collaboration.
WT:
Speaking of unions, that segues nicely into my next question, which is would you say the majority of your employees are unionized?
GC:
Out of the 20,000, about 750 are management and excluded employees.
One of the unique facts of life in British Columbia is that many managers are bargaining unit members. For example, many patient care managers are in the nurses’ bargaining unit and lab managers are in the Health Sciences Association. It’s a longstanding issue that goes back to the introduction of our first Labour Relations Code in the early 70s. It is a particular issue in the public sector in B.C.
WT:
How much of your time is taken up with labour relations? Is it a big part of your portfolio?
GC:
One of the five people who report to me is a director of consulting services and the majority of that portfolio is taken up with labour relations issues. It’s inevitable that with such a large percentage of our employees represented by trade unions that collective agreement administration and interpretation issues are a big part of our life.
WT:
It sounds to me as if relations with your unions were excellent during the SARS emergency. How are they on other issues?
GC:
I think that the honest answer is that we by and large have a very productive relationship. There are inevitably issues where we disagree and there are disputes but we have I would say a very mature relationship with our union representatives. Very often we are able to find a resolution to our issues without involving third parties, but inevitably there are incidents or issues that require third party assistance.
WT:
Switching gears here, I was on your Web site reading some employee newsletters and they featured a lot of your staff members getting involved, volunteering their time to raise funds for various causes. That made me think of the Statistics Canada report talking about volunteering and how important it is if employers support their employees in their volunteer work, it tends to make them spend more time volunteering. I’m wondering if the Fraser Health Authority does that kind of thing, like do you allow people to switch shifts or take time off or even use the facilities for volunteer purposes, etc.?
GC:
Generally, because we are a health care employer, we really recognize the huge contribution that volunteers make and volunteers are a huge part of our life in the delivery of health care.
We have an annual United Way campaign and we sponsor a loaned representative to work with the United Way to encourage people to participate in that campaign. We have committees in each of our various communities that are charged with organizing the United Way campaign within their community. There’s no question that we would like to see greater participation by our employees in the United Way campaign and that will be one of our goals for this year’s campaign.
It’s in my mind much more important that people actually participate rather than the amount of which they donate. I would be much more focused on seeing the level of participation increase and the dollars will follow. Through that campaign, people have a wide variety of opportunity to target their donations either to hospital foundations or to our own employee emergency fund, or they can donate to the general United Way campaign. So there are many, many different ways that we can choose to participate through our fundraising effort.
WT:
The rest of my questions have to deal with your career. I was reading your bio and it seems to me you’ve spent your whole career in the public sector if I’m not mistaken.
GC:
Not quite. Actually I started my career in the private sector with Four Seasons Hotels. When I first came to Canada I was with Four Seasons Hotels/Inn on the Park in Toronto and then came out here to Vancouver when Four Seasons opened in 1976. Then I did spend a fair bit of time in the public sector, both at the University of British Columbia and in government and in health care. I had spent a number of years in one of Jimmy Pattison’s businesses. It was an excellent, excellent experience.
I would say one the attributes that qualified me for this position was that unique blend of private sector and public sector and health care experience.
WT:
Do you prefer the public sector to the private sector? Or is it really not a choice of preferring one over the other?
GC:
I don’t have a preference one over the other. The thing that has always really motivated me and helped me choose my career moves is the opportunity to create something new and to be at the formative stage of a new organization—helping it to establish its strategic plan and put down the roots of effective people development systems and processes.
WT:
In keeping with your public sector background, I understand you were responsible for establishing B.C.’s Employment Standards Tribunal.
GC:
That’s correct. I was the first chair. That was 1995, I believe.
WT:
And you did that for five years.
GC:
Yes.
WT:
Would you say that was one of the most challenging HR projects you’ve ever been involved in?
GC:
I wouldn’t quite go that far. It was very interesting, it was very exciting because it was completely new. There was a piece of legislation and nothing else, so I had to build an organization from the ground up: find staff, recruit, set policy, set a vision, and choose a team.
My current role is equally exciting, if not more challenging, because it has such a broad scope and it’s such a huge organization. The issues are so diverse and health care is a very rapidly changing and very demanding area, so certainly the two are quite different. I thoroughly enjoyed it at the tribunal when I was doing that and I thoroughly enjoy what I’m doing now.
WT:
Do you still lecture at the University of British Columbia?
GC:
Last fall, I taught a collective bargaining course to the fourth-year undergrads. The students who choose the Industrial Relations Management option within the Bachelor of Commerce program are required to take a course in collective bargaining and last fall I was teaching that. Over the years, I have also enjoyed many opportunities to be a guest speaker at UBC, Simon Fraser University, and Continuing Legal Education.
WT:
I’ve spoken with other executives in the health care field and what they have said to me is they could not imagine a career that’s more rewarding in terms of directly helping people. Do you feel the same way?
GC:
Very much, I do. It’s one of the key differences between health care and other careers is that there is a huge sense of satisfaction that not only the people that you’re working with are you able to help but in fact that they in turn are in the business of helping people. It is a very rewarding career for that reason.
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