Laura Proctor's activity

In group: Coaching Improvement

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    Laura Proctor posted an update in the group Coaching Improvement 3 months ago

    Morning,

    After a week of moving house, packing, unpacking, cleaning and now waiting for my house to exchange and complete, I am in a period of learning. Learning what my new routines are. Learning how to ensure I show consideration for the well established routines of others, as we are living for the next 7 months with my future in-laws, in their home.

    One thing I have learnt through coaching, personal reflect and experience is the importance of looking after yourself. This isn’t a selfish thing, this isn’t to say I don’t consider others also, it just means that right now my priorities are about being gentle to myself and to allow this new time of change to take place.

    I share this because whatever the circumstances, change, transition and new routines are a certainty. In health care the same is true at a rapid pace, and when people come along and change long established routines, this can cause upset, annoyance, stress, upheaval. So here in lies the challenge. As people who want to help improve healthcare systems and experiences for staff and patients, how do we ensure we are not actually causing more harm than good? 

    I’m brining up two observations here….

    1. The risk we pose as ‘improvers’ of inadvertently causing harm to healthcare staff when we change “improve” their systems.

    2. The need to support people to take responsibility for their own well-being and self-care. Creating opportunities to make this easier in healthcare and indeed a priority.

    I would love to hear the thoughts of others on these issues 🙂

    • Profile picture of Nick Miller
      Nick Miller replied 3 months ago

      Hi Laura, this is a really interesting reflection. Myself and others have been thinking about this quite a bit in terms of why QI is difficult to mainstream into core business, difficult to sustain and difficult to get in to the psyche of leaders in a meaningful way. Your frame of inadvertently causing harm is, if we are honest what we see a lot of. “Another improvement initiative”, “we have tried it all before”, “it doesn’t work.”

      There are a couple of really good BMJ Quality papers that help to offer a theory as to why this might be the case. At the core is the imbalance of the technical versus the human where technical solutions and tools are prefaced over the emotional experience of those involved in improvement. Where we don’t pay attention to this we reduce emotional energy which in turn depletes emotional capacity, further reducing the ability to engage, which ultimately reduces performance and creates inertia or disengagement for the next improvement cycle.

      The longer paper took me quite a while to sink in! Like Laura it would be good to see what others think, have experienced and any good learning that can be shared.
      (live links won’t paste)

      https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/31/12/860
      https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/31/12/857