FISH Principles - Cancer Information Services
From: M. D. Anderson Department of Performance Improvement
Date: January 15, 2008

Narrator: The Cancer Information Service is the program of the National Cancer Institute. We are charged with providing the latest cancer information to the public via our 1-800-FORCANCER number. Through our Website www.cancer.gov and through our partnership program which outreaches to minority and medically underserved populations. We also do communications research. In 2002 NCI implemented new program monitoring guidelines and call expectations. And also implemented a national call monitoring program to evaluate call service to the public. Shortly after I started we received a baseline report of our quality. The baseline report showed that our office ranked 12th out of 14 offices for quality provided to callers. We knew that we, in order to be competitive, we had to improve our quality quickly and we had to do so in a way that would improve our staff moral and confidence.

The FISH philosophy of “Being There” is being present for your coworkers, for the customer. Answering their questions. Committing to them, connecting with them, spiritually, emotionally, supporting each other. That's what being there is about.

“Choosing Your Attitude” is another FISH principle. Choosing your attitude - getting up in the morning and deciding today is going to be a great day not only for you but for your callers and your colleagues, is a decision that you can make. Looking into the mirror and deciding that today is going to be a great day is all about choosing your attitude.

“Play.” Play is about not taking yourself too seriously [ laughter ]. Let me try that again.
Play. We can be serious about our work without taking ourselves too seriously. For example, instead of just having our regular run off the mill training, we'd incorporate a nice game into it. That's what play is about.

Another principle of the FISH philosophy is “Make Their Day.” It means lending a helping hand or a good ear to someone who most needs it. Just lifting someone's spirits. Some of the ways that we do that is by celebrating birthdays and we make flowers on Valentine's Day for people who needed them.

As one of the original FISH heads that attended the training that we brought back to our office to implement the FISH philosophy in our group having already incorporated FISH, we were in a great position to have to tackle quality improvement efforts. We had established a group that worked well together, was there for each other, we chose our attitudes, we played, and it kind of made an environment of trust and teamwork that laid the foundation for what was to come.

Our quality improvement problem was moving from our number 12 ranking out of 14 to number 1. And we realized that our focus for quality improvement really needed to... we needed to make sure that the staff was providing the information to the callers that was according to the National Cancer Institute guidelines and that our supervisors were giving them feedback so that they could meet these standards. And by focusing on these areas we moved from number 12 to number 1.

A great example of how we incorporated the FISH philosophy into our everyday work activities was we were participating in a national 5-day study and recruiting participants over the phone and in order to motivate our staff and meet our goal of 200 clinical trial participants, we decided to make a game out of it and be had a banana tree. And every time someone recruited a person into the study, they were able to pull a banana from the tree and the bananas contained points and as they accumulated points and the study accumulated participants, they were able to exchange those points for performance leave, and Children's Art Project items and different things that helped us actually be the first ones to recruit our participants.

We have had such a fun time implementing FISH in our office. It's so funny, we'll go out somewhere and we'll say, that's such a fishy thing. And we've all seen how we can implement it at work, and at home too. We've had a great time.