Summer Newsletter 2017 - Flipbook - Page 1
In-Brief
Article round-up / Summer 2017
Introduction
I am delighted to welcome you to our first edition of Niche In-Brief; a collection of insights
and articles from our practitioners and partners. Niche Health and Social Care Consulting
specialises in investigations, reviews, healthcare governance and health quality economics.
Our unique consultancy model ensures that governance, patient safety and quality
improvement are central to the productivity and efficiency agenda in support of the notion
that ‘good care costs less’. We hope you enjoy this edition of Niche In-Brief and look forward
to sharing many more insights from Niche and our sister company Mental Health Strategies.
Learn more about us at: www.nicheconsult.co.uk and www.mentalhealthstrategies.co.uk
Tom McCarthy, Managing Partner, Niche Health and Social Care Consulting
In this edition
Making change
sustain, Page 1-2
The leadership postmortem, Page 2
Intelligence driven
decision making, Page 4
Are you the Elephant
in the room? Page 5-6
The Homicide Brief,
Page 7
Making change sustain – top 10 actions
1.Focus on the outcome you want to see - this should help you to
define the recommendations, particularly the range of different
recommendations required to deliver the outcome.
2.Correctly define the action you want to take - all too often a vague
recommendation will result in a vague responsive action and it may be
some time (if at all) before you re-frame the nature and extent of the
recommendations. Never start off (or accept) recommendations which
start with ‘consider’ or ‘continue’ etc.
3.Get the right stakeholders involved in defining the actions - to
ensure that the relevant people and teams are engaged in the process
and invested in achieving the outcome from the start.
4.Make sure that you continuously measure achievement against
the outcomes - … what is the change you expect to see? How can
this be measured? Either through a range of KPIs or through outcome
measures.
5.Make sure there is suitably devolved ownership of actions - (i.e.
they are not all held centrally) but also ensure that there is a
sufficiently senior chain of accountability to support delivery.
6.Use assurance based action plans – and build the audit cycle in at
the start of the action (at the same time as developing the outcomes);
plan for follow-on audits through the forward internal audit cycle. It is
important to ensure that the same action planning methodology is
used by all parties so that it is recognisable and consistently applied.
1