Intent
This proposal task corresponds to the ‘plan’ stage of a PDSA-type cycle, or any small-scale improvement project. Students are guided to consider how they would plan the first steps of a simple personal improvement project that they can conduct during the remaining five weeks of the subject. The elements of this proposal will be expanded upon in assessments 2 and 3. In total, these assessments provide an opportunity for students to apply the principles of safety and quality improvement by experimenting iteratively and reflexively with the methods that are taught in this subject.
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.
Formatting requirements: In your submission, apply 12-point font size and 1.5-spaced paragraphs, with headings in bold.
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?
Present your aims statement here, based on your answers to the above questions. Refer to this activity for support.
Useful resources:
You may find this paper helpful to guide your planning – Alemi_etal_2000.pdf
