Summary

Information

Website:  achonline.org/

Contact: aachonline.org/About-AACH/Staff
Phone:  859-514-9211
Address: 201 E. Main Street, Suite 1405
Lexington, KY 40507

Mission

Mission Statement:

ACH is the professional home for all those who are committed to improving communication and relationships in healthcare.

ACH accomplishes this through:

• Welcoming researchers, educators, clinicians, patients, patient advocates, and all members of the healthcare team.
• Providing opportunities for collaboration, support and personal and professional development.
• Identifying strengths, resources and needs of patients, their family members and healthcare professionals, both as unique individuals and in relationship to one another.
• Developing skills that integrate biological, psychological and social domains.
• Applying existing scholarship from multiple disciplines and developing new knowledge through research.
• Promoting collaborative relationships between clinicians and patients, teachers and learners, and all members of the health care team.
• Incorporating core values of respect, empathy and genuineness in human relationships and the importance of self-awareness in all activities.

Vision Statement:

A health care system where all patients, healthcare professionals, trainees and researchers feel valued, are treated equitably with respect, compassion, understanding, and are actively engaged in healthcare processes and decisions.

Basic Beliefs We Share as an Organization

1. ACH believes that the healing human relationship among healthcare professionals, patients and their families is a critical aspect of healthcare. We believe that highly performing interpersonal and inter-professional delivery systems are necessary to achieve the greatest benefit from our biotechnical services.
2. ACH believes in the highest quality, most fully accessible and cost-effective health care for all.
3. ACH believes that relationship skills, communication skills, and teaching skills are learnable and teachable.
4. ACH believes that improved relationships and communication enhance team and patient satisfaction, reduce errors and grievances, improve efficacy, efficiency and safety, and enhance health outcomes, as documented in the peer-reviewed literature.
5. ACH believes that organizational investment in the continuous quality improvement of relationships and communication rewards the organization in many dimensions.
6. ACH believes in learner-centered methods of teaching and coaching, facilitating discovery of learning needs and preferred learning styles.
7. ACH leaders and teachers live the relationship-centered human values we teach, with each other in the organization and in our interactions with patients, family members, colleagues on the health care team, clients, and interested others; we strive to remain curious about and respectful of all forms of diversity that our individual experiences bring to our relationships.
8. ACH is committed to evidence-based practice in healthcare and teaching, grounded in highest quality research that continually informs our work.
9. ACH is committed to promoting diversity in its membership and leadership, including but not limited to diversity in profession, seniority, interests, gender, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation. It believes that such diversity is critical to attaining the best research, scholarship, teaching, health care and other strategic goals of the Academy. Accordingly, ACH believes it essential to assertively recruit under-represented minorities into our organization.
10. ACH is committed to assisting in the training of under-represented minority healthcare professionals and to reducing healthcare disparities.
11. ACH is committed to human relationships grounded in integrity, congruence, transparency, empathy and unconditional positive regard.
12. As a non-profit human service organization, ACH adheres to a clear mission and assures that resources are used on mission-centered activities.