Designing for Sustainment: Keeping Improvement Work on Track (Patient Safety IV)

Keeping patient safety and quality improvement projects on track, on time, and on budget is critical to ensuring their success. In this course, students will be introduced and given the opportunity to apply a series of tools to guide and manage patient safety and quality initiatives. These include tools for defining what success looks like, developing a change management plan, and conducting a pre-mortem to identify risks for project failure. This course will also provide tools for engaging stakeholders to ensure key players are invested in your project’s success.

• What Does Success Look Like?
• In this module, learners will develop an understanding of what project sustainment is and why it is important, the potential risks to project sustainment, the importance of planning for sustainment from project inception, types of measures used in quality improvement projects and the attributes of each, how strategies for improvement were developed in two successful large-scale quality improvement initiatives. Learners will become familiar with the issues impacting sustainment and how they may be successfully addressed across the life span of a quality improvement project.
• Conducting a Premortem
• In this module, learners will develop an understanding of what the Pre-Mortem exercise is and how it can be used to: improve project planning, surface threats to project success and sustainment, develop interventions to mitigate risk of project failure, create an action plan to maximize the application of Pre-Mortem results, and maintain awareness of threats to project success across the project lifespan. Learners will also develop familiarity with facilitation best-practices. The Pre-Mortem Exercise can be a powerful tool to identify and mitigate risks for project failure.
• Change Management 101
• In this module, learners will develop an understanding of: what is meant by change management, reasons for change initiative failure, change as a process, frameworks and processes for change, the differences between technical and adaptive work and the role of each in a change effort, leadership skills necessary for addressing adaptive change, identifying and engaging change effort stakeholders, managing conflict, developing a communication strategy for a change effort, applying a systems approach to change efforts.
• Planning for Engagement Using the 4 E's + 2 Model
• In this module, learners will develop an understanding of: the role of engagement in sustainability and spread, addressing barriers to engagement, potential areas of failure in sustaining change effort gains, the 2 E's of embedding and enduring and their role in sustainment, frameworks for sustaining change efforts, a real-world example of successful sustainment of a quality improvement initiative.