Learning to Change

How do you feel about learning? 

Do you remember your school years as an exciting time, or do you just recall exam anxiety? 

Whatever the answer, it is OK. 

A recent presentation on adult learning on #rebeljam15 started with "Have an open mind". As adult learners, we might be conditioned by past behaviours but we can also approach learning in a novel, productive way (if we choose to). That is because the learning science also followed an incredible evolution and has become accessible, fun and rewarding, and more than ever- necessary.

There is no question about why we need to be life long learners (LLL). Here are some of the many benefits of LLL:

Questions on Quality: Sail or Sink?

Quality in healthcare: we talk about it, debate about definitions, wonder if we can and if we do measure it. For some of us, it’s an intricate concept that feels like it could make your head explode. For others, it’s common sense: to give the best care, to the right patient, at the right time. 

If it is true that all good things (i.e. Danish-sounding ice-cream) come in small packages…can we at least hope that quality in healthcare comes in cargo loads? Or are we bound to provide healthcare on islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity?

I will not use this space to expand on the "quality" etymology or on matters of semantics. Instead, I would like to focus on 3 areas related to quality that I came across in discussions and readings this week:

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