Day 68: Pace of Change

How fast you make changes/improvements should be determined by the urgency with which change is needed.  It’s important those directly involved in and affected by change are involved in agreeing the change timetable.

It’s also important any change has the right measures so that it can quickly be determined whether it is working.  If it is not, fail fast and move on to the next thing.  I like the use of a PDSAR cycle for this:

  - Plan,

  - Do,

  - Study,

  - Act,

  - Rest.

 

This last stage is valuable as change fatigue can be debilitating to improvement activities.

Day 66: Performance Vs Outcomes

Organisations use many metrics to judge how well they are operating.  I get frustrated when performance, quality and outcome measures are seen as different things.  As far as I am concerned, if something you’re measuring is not for the purpose of improving outcomes, why are you measuring it?

Efficiency and productivity measures are important, as they can help with improvement leading to release of resources and/or reduction of costs to achieve outcomes.  Outcome measures are the ultimate demonstration of quality.  However, these outcomes need to be set with the person they are the outcomes for and must matter to them!

Day 53: Ambition

I have an ambition for Turning Point regarding Quality Improvement.  Developing a new approach to Quality Improvement is a Mountain that takes years to climb, not a hill ascended in a day.  We are in the mere foothills now, but everyone have spoken within the organisation is supportive of the journey we need to take.

Our strategic direction is to continuously improve what we do leading to better outcomes and experiences for the people we support whilst reducing health inequalities and improving wellbeing.  This is not easy; if it were everyone would be doing it and we wouldn’t be needed!

Day 44: Podcasting

Discussed the development of my podcast idea today.  I will be interviewing people about their views and ambition of quality for us.  I want to use this, amongst other tools, as part of our approach to stimulating debate across the organisation about what our collective ambition for quality is.

This will be part of my co-production approach to develop our quality ambition with the people we support, the people who work for us and other valued partners, such as our regulators and commissioners.

I have agreement from my first interviewee and am now working on the logistics.  Watch this space!

Day 39: Quality Support System

How do you know when things are going to go wrong? This is difficult, but if you have the right data and you use it in the right way, it is entirely possible to predict service failure before it happens.

I am developing a framework, which will use Machine Learning (a branch of Artificial Intelligence) to predict when things will go wrong with a service.

My aim is to be able to provide enhanced support to the service before the impact of things going wrong starts to have a detrimental effect on outcomes for users of the service and staff.