Less draining and more sustaining on WIHI

Madge Kaplan writes:

The next WIHI broadcast — Making the Work of QI Less Draining and More Sustaining — will take place on Thursday, June 5, from 2 to 3 PM ET, and I hope you'll tune in.

Our guests will include:

• Chris Hayes, MD, MSc, Med, FRCPC, Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy and Practice (IHI); Medical Officer, Canadian Patient Safety Institute
• Uma R. Kotagal, MBBS, MSc, Senior Vice President for Quality, Safety, and Transformation, James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
• Julie A. Holt, RN, MSN, CENP, Vice President, Patient Services, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

If a systems approach is our best shot at improving the safety and quality of health care, a systems approach might also help address the added time and complexity that’s often a feature of improvement work itself. There are growing signs that even the most dedicated improvement champions and clinicians are overwhelmed by what’s required to meet new standards, regulations, and reporting requirements; and, even more troubling, front line staff are starting to resent and question the value of new quality initiatives and expectations. Add to this physician burnout, which has been a festering problem in the US since the 1990s, and the time is ripe for some solutions.

The WIHI on June 5, 2014: Making the Work of QI Less Draining and More Sustaining will zero in on these issues, by taking a fresh look at the disenchantment and ways to reduce the chance of overburdening staff and physicians with change. As part of his Harkness Fellowship at IHI, Chris Hayes has been hard at work on what he terms “maximally adoptable improvement” through the use of a model and guide he’s developing. His prototype, among other things, is testing a set of criteria that ideally should be met before improvement work begins — if the initiative is to succeed. Among the criteria: early staff engagement in the planning, a clear sense of the workload required, available resources, and ensuring that everyone sees the value in what they’ll be asked to do.

None of this is surprising to Uma Kotagal and Julie Holt from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC). While CCHMC is deservedly known for its outstanding work on quality improvement and patient safety, Uma and Julie and others at CCHMC have become mindful of the burden constant change places on staff and health care providers. They’ll tell us about new efforts at CCHMC, still in the early stages, to make continuous improvement less draining and more sustaining.

I hope you’ll tune in for this essential discussion and share your ideas and potential solutions. You can enroll for the broadcast here.