Systematic Review of Communities of Practice in Healthcare

I love systematic reviews. They are hard work, major undertakings and make life much easier for the rest of us. Compliments to the authors of this new paper which can be accessed online.



How and why are communities of practice established in the healthcare sector?
A systematic review of the literature.

Geetha Ranmuthugala, Jennifer J Plumb, Frances C Cunningham, Andrew
Georgiou, Johanna I Westbrook, Jeffrey Braithwaite

Australian Institute of Health Innovation, University of New South Wales, Sydney,
NSW 2052, Australia.

Does opinion leadership change over time? New Research

I'm pleased to see useful research is being done to clarify further what we mean by opinion leadership. Too often I hear people reducing what is a very complex topic to a simple slide of Roger's characteristics. Roger's initial work on the Diffusion of Innovations was researched and published before the age fo the Internet and before many staff were born. We need updates and we need to grasp a deeper understanding of the complexities.

There's a new paper out.
Implement Sci. 2011 Oct 11;6(1):117. [Epub ahead of print]
Opinion leaders and changes over time: a survey.
Doumit G, Wright FC, Graham ID, Smith A, Grimshaw J.


I've posted the conclusions to this paper below - and recommend you read the original.


"CONCLUSIONS:
Opinion leaders identified in this study were not stable over a two-year time period and generally appear to be monomorphic with clearly demarcated areas of expertise and limited spheres of influence. These findings may limit the practicability of routinely using opinion leaders to influence practice."

Meeting Agenda Good Practice

I've been on a mission for some years to get agendas for meetings organised and prepared in a way that supports an efficient and effective process.  here are many ways to do this and a recent post from Radcliffe Learning [this link is no longer working but I'm leaving this live while I try to find another way to get to the info as it is really useful. It comes from Radcliffe Publishing and you can view earlier editions of their newsletter here)] has some excellent advice. I particularly like the way they suggest the agenda items are to be divided into:

·       Part 1: Items requiring a decision today

·       Part 2: Items requiring discussion today

·       Part 3: Items for information only today

What's your favourite tip for great meetings?

Overcoming resistance to change

Resistance to change is on that "Top Five" list of topcis I get aksed about.

I think the video below is a great answer to the question on how to overcome resistance to change:

Where are the negative studies?

I've written about his before, but I am still concerned about the lack of will to share what doesn't work in quality improvement initiatives. I worry that improvement leaders are so concerned about telling their sponsors that the work is doing very well, that they can't face the less than successful projects. We all know we learn from mistakes - in fact one of the basic tents of quality improvement is the importance of testing and learning (from the good and the bad).

I keep threatening to start the Journal for Quality and Safety Initiative Learning/Mistakes/Failures/Messes.  When I figure the title I'll get it going.  Any suggestions?

Predicting implementation success from organisational readiness

I've wondered for a while whether there is any evidence that we can predict the success of a change based on the organisation's readiness for the change - else why would we bother with worrying about readiness? As always, loads of researchers have not only been worrying about this issue, they have also been investigating it. I found numerous papers, however, one captured my interest - probably because of the rational and detailed way in which the research was conducted.   The conclusion as I figure it, is that it all depends on the biases (or not) in the readiness instrument.

You can read this paper here.