Here’s our five-step guide to implementing Human Factors training within your own organisation.

1. Form your team

Find time to meet

Agree roles and responsibilities

  • Arrange first meeting with all team members to explain the aims of the project and the approach. You could adapt this kick-off meeting presentation to help you.
  • If your team are new to quality improvement, consider using the “Anyone for tennis?” session to introduce them to the basics of quality improvement.
  • Agree project team terms of reference.
  • Arrange ongoing meetings as required to maintain momentum (eg once a fortnight) and then around once every four to six weeks.
  • Set up a shared file location so that all project members have access to relevant documents.

Ensuring patient and carer involvement

  • People in Health West of England have produced resources and guides including public contributor role profiles, guidelines and forms.
  • Business Innovation Factory narrative playbook on using stories to improve care.
  • Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership have put together e-learning for QI for public contributors which may be helpful for new public contributors.

2. Agree your aim

Complete project charter

  • Complete project charter (editable) and printable.
  • Start communication and stakeholder engagement.
  • Start risks and issues log. Review at each team meeting. An issue is something that is happening. A risk is something that might happen. Please use your own organisational risk management scoring for likelihood and impact of risks occurring. The status of a risk can be open (action required), accepted (all mitigation in place, no action required), closed (risk or issue has been closed). Templates for issues log and risk log.
  • Start team action log and update at the end of each team meeting.
  • Our guide to project management has useful tools in agreeing your actions and planning your project.

Consider target audience and complete training capacity plan

3. Agree your measures

How do we know that a change is an improvement?

How will we gather this data and what baseline data do we need?

Agree your communication plan for the project

4. Agree your actions

Carry out small-scale Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) tests of change

Generating ideas for tests of change

  • Sometimes it can be difficult to identify ideas for testing changes. There are many techniques to help you with this including root cause analysis, idea generation and the six thinking hats
  • For analysing incidents and complaints you may find this model from Yorkshire and Humber Improvement Academy helpful to identify contributory factors; more information at http://www.improvementacademy.org/resources/an-evidence-based-framework-for-investigating-safety-incidents/
  • Once you have your ideas use a prioritisation matrix to decide which to proceed with.

Hold training sessions

Test out supporting tools like posters, cards and stickers

Send an interim report after first 3 – 6 months to your senior management.

5. Evaluate and embed

  • Review and share the learning from your PDSA cycles online in the Life forum or write a lessons learned log.
  • If using safety climate questionnaire, carry out follow-up survey.
  • Complete evaluation report and celebrate and communication your success ‑ example emails to your senior management team.
  • For more support with evidence and evaluation check out these toolkits produced by the Avon Primary Care Research Collaborative in conjunction with the West of England AHSN. [add link to Jo’s toolkits once live].
  • Write up your project as a case study.

Project trouble-shooting