Justin exemplifies our vision, mission, and values in every interaction with patients, staff, and leadership. He strives for excellence in all he does and remains open-minded to others’ ideas and feedback in that pursuit. His open-mindedness allows him to manage a diverse staff, both in their identities and in their wide variety of roles and responsibilities. When he is unsure of how to approach a situation, he seeks guidance and understanding to ensure he approaches it with the proper knowledge and compassion. Justin is sincere and deeply cares for his staff. He has continued to develop the Leadership team for his department and helps support innovation and quality improvement by encouraging input and new ideas. Justin’s long-term career goal was to be a manager at the University of Kansas Health System, and when he earned his opportunity, he repeatedly proved that he absolutely deserved it. Thanks to his steadfast dedication to our staff and leadership team, he has helped grow his department from approximately 160 staff to 240. He has quickly established a reputation among our employees as a manager who is fair, quick to help, family-centered, and deeply kind.

Our employees feel comfortable reaching out to Justin for support as they know he will take the time to listen to them, understand their perspective, and deal with any issues promptly. Thanks to Justin’s leadership, we have been able to support staff through personal difficulties, see them through to the other side, and get them back to their full responsibilities at our organization. Not only has this shown his department that leadership is truly here to help and support them, but it has had the system-wide benefit of retaining staff who may have otherwise left the bedside or the organization. Due to the nature of his department, with its vast size and dispersion, ensuring staff feel supported is an extra challenge. Despite this challenge, Justin has managed to develop relationships with our staff and ensure they feel supported, even when it’s not possible for our team to see each employee every shift.

Justin motivates and influences others by taking time to get to know his employees and proving through his actions that he truly cares about them and their goals. He takes time to get to know our nursing associates and talks to them about their career aspirations, connecting them with other department nurses who started out as new graduates to encourage mentorship, advancement, and retention. If they end up deciding they want to start on another unit or pursue a specialty such as ICU, maternal/child, or ED, he helps get them a shadow on the unit and continues to help them make connections. He goes out of his way to help our employees pursue their goals. In the end, he does everything he can to ensure they stay with the health system, even if it isn’t in his department.

Additionally, he supports personal and professional growth with our other staff. If a nurse wants to expand their skill set and knowledge, he will pursue opportunities for them to cross-train to other areas. Under his leadership and guidance, his department has cross-trained its first acute care nurse to work ICU. This project has taken some time to implement and required building relationships and trust with key stakeholders from the ICU division. So far, we have cross-trained two employees in the ICUs, and we look forward to continuing this work. Justin has also enabled his department to expand our backup charge nurse cross-training. Prior to Justin’s leadership, his department only had a handful of nurses we could use to charge on units. We now have approximately 20 and are currently finishing up the training of four more. This training has come just in time for the opening of several new units and has been invaluable in our ability to support these openings.

Additionally, he is continuously looking for ways to praise and acknowledge his employees. He never misses a chance to nominate our outstanding staff for the Exceptional Performers Bonus. Thanks to his motivation and support, we have been able to help our employees grow and kept them from leaving our department for other areas or health systems.

I have been impressed by many of Justin’s leadership qualities; however, some of his greatest strengths are his communication skills and approach to conflict. I have witnessed firsthand so many examples of his ability to effectively communicate with staff. He is able to remove emotion and balance both assertiveness and empathy, giving staff a clear understanding of expectations while also making them feel heard. One situation that comes to mind happened soon after he started as the department interim manager. I was asked to follow up with an employee who had been reported as being abrupt and unprofessional. I knew from previous follow-ups that giving constructive feedback to this employee could be difficult. Because Justin was new to the role, he hadn’t yet met this employee but wanted to come along for the discussion. I agreed, fully expecting I would be handling most of the interaction. I made the introductions, and the employee started to explain their side of the situation. Almost immediately, the employee agreed that they probably were a bit too terse and explained that their child had just received a very serious and chronic health diagnosis. They admitted to having an off day and were feeling very overwhelmed. Justin quickly jumped in on the conversation and handled it perfectly. He was able to help calm the employee and discuss actions we could take to help support them and their personal situation, all while still holding them accountable for their actions at work. I was truly amazed at how quickly he read the situation with an employee he’d never met, as well as how well he and I were able to tag team the conversation. At this point, this was our first follow-up together, and as far as I know his first follow-up with this department. When we finished the conversation, the employee was calm, appreciative of the support, and clearly felt heard and understood. After that experience I was convinced, he was going to be a great fit in our leadership team, which he has consistently proven in his tenure as manager.

I believe Justin is the textbook definition of a team player. Our department has two mottos: 1. Ride the Wave and 2. We go where we’re needed. We’ve always taken seriously our responsibility to do whatever the Health System needs, and we take pride in our resilience, positivity, and flexibility. Justin fits into that culture perfectly, and the last two years have especially demonstrated that. Since the beginning of the pandemic, he has helped lead us through so many adventures! He has partnered with other leaders to set up and run entrance screening, opened Indian Creek overflow twice, managed countless openings and closings of overflows, opened CAPP3, opened CA10, and is now very involved in opening BH42. He also took over CMU in July 2021 and has been managing them since. When we had additional staffing challenges in the Fall of 2021, he helped establish the patient companion role in order to help free up patient care aides from constant observation duties to be able to work on the floor. Justin already has his hands full managing approximately 240 staff members between Float Pool, Resource Management Center, Patient Safety Monitors, and Central Monitoring Unit, but despite that he is always willing to help with whatever new challenge is around the corner. He provides a calm, resilient, and flexible example for all our staff and leadership team.

Justin Moulin has a patient and staff-centered approach to leadership that has truly elevated Float Pool and the Resource Management Center over the last few years. Although there are countless examples of Justin’s excellence and dedication to his role here, one that I believe demonstrates several qualities of an expert nurse leader is our development of the Employee Report Card. Initially, the Employee Report Card was a dream of mine from several years ago. The idea was that we would track and share various quality metrics that included both their personal metrics as well as Float Pools metrics. Although a simple idea, the execution was much more difficult than I initially expected. Prior to becoming the Float Pool Supervisor, I hadn’t opened excel probably since my computer sciences class in high school. Thanks to our previous manager, I was able to take some basic excel classes. For a couple of years, the Employee Report Card was a project I would work on when I had time, however never seemed to be able to give it the time and attention needed to really make progress. I had started to feel discouraged and almost convinced myself it was a silly pet project and possibly one not worth pursuing. When Justin came on as our manager, I shared with him my idea. He was very excited about it and helped encourage me to dedicate more time to it. He made it one of our 2021 goals and even had us discuss it as a leadership team.

Previously when working on it I would keep it to myself, thinking it was a little side project and everyone else was too busy or not interested in it. Thanks to Justin’s excitement and encouraging collaboration, we finally had a breakthrough. There was one barrier I was having that I couldn’t crack. As a team we discussed it and our AA, K, had some great suggestions for ways to tackle the problem. K ended up being the one to find the solution and once she taught me how to implement it, the Employee Report Card was finally a reality. The first report card we completed was for the registered nurses. Every month they received a report card with their BCMA rates, blood culture contamination, insulin scanning, specimen collection errors, and attendance events. Since sending out the first report card back in March 2021, Float Pool has improved its scan rates every single month (with the exception of one) and had an overall improvement of 0.7%. Although that doesn’t sound like a lot, Float Pool makes up one of the largest nursing departments and gave a total of 359,987 meds last year. With that improvement, we have now avoided over 250 potential meds errors purely by making our data transparent and allowing Float Pool to keep itself accountable.

One surprising outcome of the report card is the conversations employees have with the leadership team and each other. Some of our new grads compare their BCMA rates and compete. Other nurses will come to talk to me about a missed scan they had, why they had it, and are typically upset that their perfect scan rate is messed up. Not only is it great that employees are initiating conversations about their own performance, but it has also helped us catch system issues such as meds that aren’t scanning correctly. Prior to this type of accountability, many nurses would have just overridden the scan and moved on with their shift. Now we are seeing these issues almost in real-time. We had so much success with the RN Report Card that we have now expanded it to our Patient Care Technician as well as the Patient Safety Monitors. We track and share data specific to their roles as well as their attendance incidents. Getting monthly attendance updates has also helped our employees keep a closer eye on their own attendance. This has the added benefit that now when we give an attendance verbal or other corrective action the employee is rarely surprised. This effort has shown considerable improvement in Float Pool’s quality metrics just by tracking, sharing, and promoting transparency with this data. Thanks to Justin’s leadership this massive project finally became a reality. He was able to rally our leadership team and encourage collaboration, provided the resources and time for innovation, motivated and encouraged me in my pursuit of this improvement, and has helped pioneer a tool to hold Float Pool accountable for their own performance. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a positive impact Justin has had, not only on Float Pool but the health system as a whole. Due to the nature of his role and his unassuming nature, I believe no one will ever know just how much he does for his peers, leadership team, employees, and The University of Kansas Health System. It has been a true honor to get to work alongside him and I couldn’t ask for a better leader. He has truly been an anchor during these difficult times and has provided the support and understanding to keep Float Pool ‘riding the wave’ and showing up for the Health System time and time again.