Sector: Other (Medication management)
Organization: Waterbury hospital
PD Practitioner: Tony Cusano, MD and PD team coordinator at Waterbury hospital and assistant professor, Yale school of medicine.
Location: Waterbury, CT, USA
“Many quality improvement processes, particularly those that attempt to teach evidence-based best practices by simply disseminating information regarding their use, or mandating their use, have been ineffective in sustaining change in professional performance.
While groups have developed and introduced “Best Practices” that they consider likely to improve the performance of health care professionals, these processes have often suffered from a lack of sustainability due to their focus on technical solutions rather than on engaging professionals in a way that motivates them to change their behavior and adopt those solutions. The top-down approach of introducing “answers” to complex problems that come from outside of a medical community often fails to inspire change in professionals who have spent much of their lives developing effective work habits and confidence in their own ability to solve problems.
We believe that the respectful manner through which Positive Deviance seeks to instill change in groups of people dealing with particular problems led to the successful and sustainable improvement in medication management during the transition out of hospital care.