Sustaining change

Sustainable management of clinical capacity to meet demand can be lost if work is not undertaken to ensure improvements can be sustained.  This includes:

• Updating policies, procedures and Standard Operating Protocols (SOPs) to provide clear and explicit guidance on the new processes.
• Developing and sharing relevant resources required by staff to sustain new ways of working.
• Training all relevant staff in new ways of working, including sharing lessons from the improvement journey to help all staff understand why the updated processes and procedures makes a difference to care.
• Documenting learning from the change process in a learning log to prevent it being lost and the organisation accidently removing changes in the future due to loss of knowledge.
• Continuing to monitor the outcome measure on a quarterly basis to provide assurance that improvements are being sustained. Should outcome measures demonstrate improvements beginning to slip, use process measures to identify what is causing the slippage and use the learning log to help identify change ideas to address the issue through PDSA cycles.
• Celebrating the successes your team have had sustaining the improvement.