Pragmatic
Healthcare
Improvement
‘Pragmatic and psychologically safe improvement that makes sense to
everyone especially those doing the work’
Pragmatic Improvement
All too often attempts to introduce continuous and sustainable improvement within healthcare are driven in a manner that doesn’t always resonate with patient facing teams so buy in is minimal or fragmented. People will never buy in to improvement unless they truly understand the purpose in straightforward and simple to understand language.
Importantly, that purpose needs to make sense to everyone e.g. a junior doctor or nurse is less likely to buy into a national target they can’t relate to or something that creates extra work, the value of which they fail to see. However, they are more likely to buy into a purpose that helps their patients not to wait unnecessarily, reduces wasteful processes, and makes their jobs easier.
Our improvement approach is to make things as pragmatic and simple as possible following known improvement methodologies. However, the foundation of our approach is centred around the people doing the work and creating psychological safety.
Why psychological safety is the building block for improvement:
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Team members feel more engaged and motivated to improve processes.
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There’s better decision making as people are more likely to voice their honest opinions, thoughts and concerns. This in turn leads to more diverse ideas and perspectives when looking to solve problems and implement improvements.
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It will enable a culture of continuous improvement and learning as people will feel more comfortable to test things, share mistakes and learn from them without judgment.
The positive impact upon performance, innovation and improvement has been well proven over the past two decades. One of the most famous studies being project Aristotle which looked at team effectiveness across Google. The project concluded that who was on the team mattered less than how the team worked together. The most important factor was psychological safety.
Our approach commences with finding out how psychologically safe teams feel. This is the starting point and usually shows great improvement opportunities. Imagine a culture where everyone is safe to speak up, voice their opinions and ask questions without being judged. Imagine a culture where managers provide air cover and safety so employees feel free to deliver the improvements they know will work.
Once teams feel more psychologically safe the focus is then upon making the improvements in a manner that is dependable, has structure, meaning and impact.
Basically, we encourage teams to think more like farmers than firefighters because:
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Farmers don’t shout at the crops.
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Farmers don’t blame the crops for not growing fast enough.
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Farmers don’t uproot crops before they’ve had a chance to grow.
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Farmers chose the best plants (processes / people) for the soil.
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Farmers irrigate and fertilise (provide motivation and support),
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Farmers remove weeds (constraints and obstacles).
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Farmers realise outcomes are not always predictable, sacking the farmer and their team won’t help the crops grow faster.
We specialise in several improvement areas which you can read about here.
