How do you implement a healthcare strategy across your teams?

Conduct a "day in the life" simulation. This involves shadowing healthcare professionals across different roles for a day to gain firsthand insight into their daily challenges, workflows, and interactions with patients. This immersive experience can uncover nuanced aspects of the current situation that may not be apparent through traditional assessments, allowing for a more empathetic and holistic understanding before strategy implementation.

For emergency management assessments, a hazardous vulnerability analysis and business impact analysis must be performed annually. We’ve updated this tool to allow for more predictive and finite level planning that eliminates qualitative guessing. Visit wgprepare.org.

A strategy should have objectives, then actions and tactics to help achieve the objectives but more importantly is the budget and lastly the indicators that allow you to celebrate. Missed steps in the strategy matrix or lack of the agreed actions, tactic or logistics can adversely affect the implementation or the impact of the strategy The healthcare strategy should have short term goals of low lying fruits and the long term goals. This gives the management instances for review and see if they should continue with the strategy as it is or there should be areas of improvement.

I can’t emphasize this point enough, especially in healthcare where the day to day tasks can overshadow the mission Paint your team the broader picture. Storytelling can be a useful tool. Show them the future,and the minutia becomes important

Consider incorporating regular checkpoints or "pulse checks" to evaluate progress and adapt strategies accordingly. These can be quick, informal meetings or surveys to gather feedback and address any emerging challenges promptly. Keeping a finger on the pulse of your team's dynamics and progress can help maintain momentum and ensure continuous improvement towards your healthcare strategy objectives.

Couldn't agree more that communication is key. Please remember different channels and modes of communication to support access to the information by the diverse roles in your organisation (I.e. those who don't have access to or routinely use emails) and the diverse way in which people process information. Help people to understand what it will mean to them and build it into routine conversations /paperwork such as managerial supervision, so that the message is often heard and seen, not launched and crashed after a month!

Best to remember that not all stakeholders need the same level of engagement. Stakeholder analysis through effective use of a stakeholder matrix would allow adequate use of time and resources when it comes to engagement strategies. Such matrix recognizes that different stakeholders have different needs depending on levels of interest and influence or power that they can exert on any given initiative.

Also remember to actively listen to and make changes based on engagement /feedback.Tell people that you've heard what they said and made changes. This will motivate others to engage.

If the strategy is an unfamiliar concept with some team members you may also need to "Direct" them more (Blanchard, Zigarmi and Zigarmi 1985 Situational Leadership Model). This will prevent those unaware and without appropriate skills at that point in time to develop them whilst ensuring the implementation succeeds through clear direction.

Acting on evaluation findings to refine the strategy is very important, but, sadly, seldom utilised. Shoving a square peg into a round hole rarely works well, even with a sledge hammer! Populations are different are the staff delivering the services so a lift and shift approach is often a disaster without bespoke changes.

Some ways I've found to celebrate reward and successes are to pause to appreciate the wins, no matter how small, and take time to empower staff. Empowered staff leads to a happier work environment, and fosters problem-solving skills. Growing your colleagues only makes your team that much stronger. A bottom-up, transformational approach in leadership is a must for any sustained long-term success.

It is very important to recognize the problems as it is the first step in addressing a potiential issue. Issues. Be it clinical, operational or Logistical, issues are inevitably present in every department. The idea and goal should be to improve best possible patient centered care, in a very time efficient manner. Providing efficient service but at the expense of lot of time or vice versa is not optimum. Regular Audits, drills and roles and responsibilities assigned to leaders and managers based on the capability of individuals and creating an open, transparent working environment should be a basic preamble and working its way upwards to produce best results