Change Management

Even though we know change in healthcare is inevitable, change requires effort and in some cases a substantial amount of effort to sustain it. Recently the Professional Practice Team and I had the opportunity to review a video “All Washed Up”.

In the video Hyrum Grenny, a junior researcher works with 80 children to change their hand washing behaviour, prior to being treated to some very delicious looking cupcakes. The children are challenged to complete a group activity where they are asked to put together an interesting puzzle. Hyrum’s research is to try to understand what works best to get the kids to wash their hands: personal motivation, changing the environment to make the task easier or social influence, peer pressure. Hyrum’s findings suggest that both motivation and ability are key and that personal influence, social influence and the influence of the structure of our environments are all important. He identifies that to make change stick, you need to include at least 4 of the influencers, preferably all 6. What is most interesting is that the motivators to get kids to wash their hands before they touch the cupcakes are easily transferred to our hospital environment. We are always trying to improve how we make change; we think Hyrum has some great ideas. I invite you to take a look at Hyrum’s research: http://bit.ly/3tkgNr .

Any suggestions you can offer to help us with making change stick would be greatly appreciated.