Change Management in Healthcare: 5 Best Practices
Change is essential in healthcare’s constantly evolving landscape. The fact that nearly 70% of new organizational initiatives fail underscores the urgency of this challenge. Proper change management in healthcare—the systematic approach for driving an organization from its current state to a desired future state—can make all the difference. Like developing a weak muscle, it targets mindset and culture to attain lasting innovation.
Healthcare leaders know the steps to strengthening muscle, but hearts and attitudes are a tougher consideration. To help you address these difficult cultural aspects, we’ll review some applicable change management models in healthcare, offering five best practices to enable the success of your organization’s improvement mindset.
What Is Change Management in Healthcare?
In healthcare, the end goal is often focused on improving quality of care and patient safety. Navigating new developments with a structured process allows organizations to also harness unavoidable shifts (like advancing technology) to facilitate better outcomes.
Why Is Change Management Important in Healthcare?
Change management can help ensure a smoother transition with staffing, operational, technological, and cultural shifts. It has the capacity to reduce costs with new program implementation while benefitting:
- Patient satisfaction and health outcomes.
- Staff engagement and morale.
- Compliance alongside updated regulations.
- Clinical care efficiency with the adoption of new technologies.
- A culture of safety and adaptation.
Are There Specific Change Management Strategies in Healthcare?
Change management theory in healthcare has driven the adoption of several useful models for implementing new programs or initiating organizational reform. We’ll review some of the key change management models that can be utilized in healthcare settings.
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The ADKAR Model |
This five-step model is guided by the components of its acronym:
These steps span the continuum of enablement to engagement for facilitating lasting organizational change. |
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John Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model |
A highly celebrated model for implementing effective change, Kotter’s framework follows eight key steps:
The emphasis of this model is the acceptance of change rather than the implementation, focusing on receptiveness as the key requirement. |
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Lewin’s Change Management Model |
Lewin’s process is broken down into three essential steps:
These distinct stages account for the necessity of preparation, action, and internalization to direct effective change. |
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McKinsey’s Influence Model |
This psychology-guided approach uses four building blocks to encourage innovation:
They signify the importance of considering human nature as the major driver in change adoption and adherence. |
How to Manage Change in Healthcare: 5 Tips
The necessity of participation is a common theme among all those change management models. In healthcare settings, the need for staff engagement to innovate is especially true. Here are our five best practices for successful organizational transformations in the healthcare setting.
1. Invest in Relationships
Mutual trust forms the backbone of innovation in healthcare. This may look like shared governance and the allowance for staff to participate in leadership decisions. It can also appear in the form of staff brainstorming events used to inform system-wide reform. However it shows up in the healthcare environment, those relationships form the bedrock of change readiness and willing participation.
Example: Nursing leadership demonstrates trust and care by being receptive to learning about unitwide safety issues and initiatives from the staff’s perspective during safety huddles.
2. Highlight the Imperative
This step aligns with the beginning aspect of the reviewed models’ call for early communication. In healthcare, onboarding staff requires not only communication (ensured with foundational relationships), but understanding of the imperative. By signaling its significance to patient safety, regulatory compliance, and even staff wellbeing, facility leadership incentivizes the early acceptance of a need for change, and the eventual participation in reform.
Example: The chief nursing officer meets with surgical units to express the imperative of a new time-out program, highlighting the recent frequency of never events like wrong-site surgeries and the severity of the current risk to patient safety.
3. Ensure Engagement Through Buy-In
This is often the stage where the effects of change management in healthcare become noticeable. For the process to come to successful fruition, staff members need to integrate the necessary changes into their clinical approach. This can’t be achieved without authentic buy-in. If staff believe in both the imperative and the end result of the new program, they’ll be willing to contribute to the process’s necessary rollout measures.
Example: Clinic nurses are enthusiastic about the new patient relationship management program because they know that it will improve satisfaction scores while cutting costs, enabling those savings to be better spent elsewhere. The nursing team integrates a discharge stop-gap to ensure patients have access to the new self-scheduling and health information portal.
4. Stay Grounded in Staff Needs
Most healthcare changes are going to require additional effort from staff members. This may be temporary as staff acclimate to a new, more efficient system, or, it may be a long-term additional task. However the change affects staff, leadership needs to remain open to hearing the challenges and helping mitigate them for the adoption of the intended change to continue.
Example: During the new surgical time-out safety measures, certain members of the team consistently refuse to participate, citing the time drain. Leadership steps in and reapproaches their buy-in measures while reviewing the surgical scheduling complications to ensure that the entire team is cooperative with the new protocol.
5. Review and Refine as Needed
Once a new initiative has been adopted, leaders need to continue impressing the significance of an improvement mindset. Change management strategies in healthcare always encourage continued evolution, mirroring and complementing the flux of healthcare itself. A proactive leader knows that managing change in healthcare is never over, and that refinement is always possible.
Example: A newly adopted accidental needlestick protocol was implemented successfully, but staff have expressed a mental burden associated with the protocol paperwork. Leadership interviews employees and collects data and feedback on how to streamline the documentation process.
Drive Sustainable Innovation at Your Facility
Effective change management in healthcare can help organizations navigate a shifting care landscape while ensuring better outcomes for patients and staff. Enhance your pursuit of quality improvement with IntelyCare’s wide range of facility guides and best practice recommendations.