Improvement project proposal
Objective
This assessment task addresses these subject learning objectives:
B. Design, plan and implement a quality improvement project
C. Communicate quality improvement needs and outcomes to different audiences
D. Develop strategies to identify and address barriers to quality improvement
E. Critically appraise a range of methods to measure and evaluate quality improvement.
Assessment task instructions
Create a simple plan to take the first steps towards improving one aspect of your own life over the course of the following five weeks in this subject.
To make this achievable, you should choose something that occurs regularly and frequently (e.g. daily) and is within your control to change, such as your own behaviour.
Examples in your personal life may be: to do more exercise, drink less alcohol, set aside time for self-care, spend more quality time with your children, go to bed earlier or similar.
Examples in your professional life may be: to check in on colleagues’ wellbeing more frequently, to answer all emails before 5pm, to block out time in your day to concentrate on studies, to change something about how you communicate with patients, and so on.
In this assessment, you should apply the principles learnt in Week 1 to put together a short proposal. Follow the instructions below on how to structure this proposal and what to include.
1. Answer the following questions, using the headings (those in bold) in your submission. You should consider the points below the headings when answering the questions.
a. What is the problem about, and what might you be able to do about it?
How do you know that it is a problem? What ‘evidence’ do you have that this is something that needs to be improved? Is there data available about other people’s experiences of this issue?
What are some actions (interventions) you could realistically do to address this problem now? Why do you think they might help?
What might prevent you from taking those actions? What might help? (If you have tried to address this problem before, your reflections on that process would be highly relevant and useful here.)
b. How are you going to know that you have made an improvement?
What outcome measure could you record to understand what the current situation is so that you will know if it has changed in the future (improvement)?
Note: before you change anything, you should first record this data for a period of time, as a baseline measure.
What measures could you record to keep track of what processes might be affecting your outcomes?
c. What might be a realistic improvement to aim for in five weeks?
Is there anything in the research literature or published data that can help you to determine what can realistically be achieved in five weeks?
d. What is your proposed aims statement?