Resources

Trying to improve care in human services can be overwhelming. We start out with great aspirations to fix a care quality issue. But as we get closer to the problem it appears to loom ever larger, and we wonder what we’ve got ourselves into. Most care quality issues are entrenched and multifaceted and can’t be solved by a single solution or big-bang change. Often our initial enthusiasm wanes and we default to revising the procedure and running training because everything else seems too hard. Essentially, we’ve wasted time and effort on maintaining the problem, rather than finding the solution.

Engagement surveys show a never-before-seen level of fatigue and burn-out. The last results of the National Health Service (NHS) national staff survey showed 46.8% of staff have felt unwell as a result of work-related stress in the previous 12 months. Attrition and turnover are at near all-time highs.

In this Lightbulb Moment webinar, Dr Cathy Balding interviewed Allison Patchett to discuss her "ah-ha!" moment about quality and efficiency - symbiotic or siloed?

In this Lightbulb Moment webinar, Dr Cathy Balding interviewed Filomena Ciavarella to discuss her "ah-ha!" moment about the difference between quality and quality systems.

Here is a list of resources to help managers and senior leaders help their teams become accreditation-ready every day.

In this Lightbulb Moment webinar, Dr Cathy Balding spoke with experienced safety and quality practitioner Cathy Jones about her first safety and quality "ah-ha!" moment about quality plans. They explored the ‘when, what and why’ of Cathy Jones’ lightbulb moment.

Care and service improvement requires the ability to make successful local change, then to transfer this for implementation in other departments and services, or across a whole organisation or sector. However, research shows that highly institutionalised and complex healthcare systems find the spread of transformation difficult, being naturally slow to adapt, innovate, and improve. Change therefore usually happens incrementally and inconsistently, with successful innovation resembling a journey rather than a single event. This is characterised by processes of adoption, implementation, sustaining, spreading, and scaling up.

Too often, seemingly simple improvement interventions are implemented without fully considering how the intervention might achieve the desired results, whether it can cause harm, or whether a different intervention should be considered. The tendency to favour rapid solutions and implementation over longer-term analysis and measurement represents a common pitfall in quality and safety studies.

In this webinar, Dr Katharine See shared her insights from her experience with implementing a digital care pathway for patients with lung cancer. She discussed the importance of collecting outcomes for impact, co-designing digital pathways with clinicians and consumers and lessons learned. 

Providers must have a written plan for continuous improvement that explains how the provider will meet its obligations in relation to the service and the standards.