Smarter Quality Improvement – Putting People at the Heart of Improvement in Practice
Synopsis
Does the thought of quality improvement fill you with dread? Does it feel like yet another thing that hard pressed, understaffed veterinary teams need to juggle alongside their increasingly demanding clients? Maybe it feels like a tick box exercise which is never really going to change anything. Recent research in the veterinary industry shows that both understanding and improving how we deliver care is hard for veterinary teams. There are barriers to speaking up, teams frequently feel frustrated that changes won’t happen or won’t be focused on the things that matter to them most. Increasing attention is being paid across a range of industries to the difference between work as imaging (what me might think happens or what leaders think happens) and work as done (what actually gets done in real world). Frameworks for learning from work as done, including what goes well as well as what goes wrong can be used to ensure quality improvement work targets what really matters to teams. Creating conditions for psychological safety, exploring different viewpoints on how work is actually happening and identifying what is getting in people’s way most are all central to putting people at the heart of quality improvement efforts. When leaders learn the approaches and skills do this, teams feel safe to speak up, to ask for change and drive the improvements and changes they want to see.
Learning outcomes
- Understand common barriers to improvement, change and speaking up in practice
- Appreciate the difference between work as imagined and work as done and how improvements focused on the former will fail
- Learn how people -focused improvements can build team members’ sense of efficacy and agency, building more engaged, positive teams
