Champions of Work Redesign
PRHI recognizes that improvements at the point of patient care depend on a team leader/champion, a change method that works, performance measurement, and shared passion for excellence.
In 2005, with funding provided by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF), a series of fellowships for Champions of Work Redesign was launched. The intent was to provide clinical leaders with the tools and training to improve patient safety and healthcare quality in their work settings and with the opportunity to form knowledge and support networks among themselves.
Our Champions programs are a series of professional development programs and demonstrations that JHF initiated to bring process engineering principles, systems thinking and other quality improvement tools into the hands of the region’s healthcare professionals. Those trained in the programs are linked in learning networks to further develop and spread understanding of these methods.
A flexible template developed for the programs calls for participants to receive training in PRHI’s process improvement method known as Perfecting Patient CareSM (PPC). In addition, Champions are to conduct demonstrations using the method, receive on-site coaching in process improvement from PRHI, meet periodically with peers as a means of sharing experience, and publish and present findings as a means of disseminating replicable models for improvement.
Champions test our methods in hospitals, ICUs, pathology labs, skilled nursing facilities, and community practices. They expose the weaknesses of the status quo, showing what waste, error, inefficiencies and substandard practices are doing to patient outcomes and worker satisfaction. They document how systems fail both workers and patients, and they show that it was possible to fix this.
Champions set targets at the theoretical limits (as close to zero as possible) for Hospital-Acquired Infections (HAI) and achieved those targets in ICUs and units working to eradicate Central Line-Associated Bloodstream Infections (CLABS), Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA), Ventriculostomies, Urinary Tract Infections and others. They show the value of human factors engineering in health settings and made available to clinical teams gloves, sanitizers, sterile kits, checklists, etc. They clean, organize and set in order pharmacies, labs, equipment and supply rooms. They show the value of redesigned work.
Working with physicians, nursing staff, pharmacists and managers across the spectrum of healthcare settings, PRHI helps prove the value of PPC in demonstrations targeting both clinical and operational problems.