"The Four Frank Principles"

I have to write this down as it is still fresh on my mind: I greatly enjoyed Prof. Art Frank's keynote speech at the 2015 Imagine Project! What an inspiring and truthful depiction of the challenges in health care, brilliantly set into words by such an accomplished scholar! In his speech, Prof. Frank enumerated 4 principles that I will call "The Four Frank Principles":

1. Responsible response. Take one idea per month and track the progress! (Yes! Who needs 13 organizational goals, each with 6 sub-goals?!). This is how many hospital institutions became huge success stories. Look up the Cincinnati Children's Hospital, Virginia Mason Medical Centre, Jonkoping County in Sweden, Kaiser Permanente. They all 'gold-plated the bolt'.

2. Small and specific demands. Please, do not talk about 'transformational change'...a small change in attitude can have great effects (for example respect patient's time and dignity; establish open charting etc.). Change starts with small steps. And as Hugh MacLeod, the CEO of the Canadian Patient Safety Institute, exclaims: Stop calling healthcare a system!

On Measuring Performance and the Bell Curve

I have recently had an interesting conversation with one of our surgeons about clinical performance and how to improve on it. The talk inevitably led to a discussion on the validity of the bell curve, and how surgical performance can be improved once you are in the top performing zone. As you probably know, the bell curve has been used for years as a model on how people perform. As the image below shows, this model is easy to understand and stipulates that human performance fits a normal distribution, with most performers being average and occupying in the middle, while poor performers and high performance as outliers. 

However, in 2012, a research study involving over 600K participants

New Year: Let's Talk About Resolutions!

It's that time of the year again: you can barely find a parking spot at the gym or a corner to spread your yoga mat in a studio, the produce section at the grocery store is suddenly the busiest place in town, and everyone has a (sometimes manic) glitter of determination in their eyes. If you are one of the people who make New Year resolutions (nothing wrong with that!),  research actually says that you have an 8% chance to stick to it. Yes. Eight Per Cent. Sorry to be a downer, but I am also quite unhappy with the fact that in healthcare up to 70% of change initiatives fail! And for the amount of opportunities for improvement, this is discouraging.

Why do we fail to change? Just like in self-improvement, workplace improvement fails from the very same reasons: competing priorities, the daily whirlwind of activity that makes it difficult to keep on our plan, and choosing far too many goals to reach. But beware! There is that 8% of people who succeed, just like those 25% of change initiatives that prove there is hope! I am clinging on to this rope of hope (ha!) and wonder what can we do to succeed?