Impact

Both of those leads were confused at first, wondering why I was putting them in charge of something they knew very little about. They both did remarkable things with their elements though. Since they had an outside perspective, they were able to focus on the process rather than the content. If our case managers had been assigned to the post-discharge services element they would have focused on which services were available and how to secure more of them. The social worker was able to step back and notice how broken the process of organizing post-discharge services was in the first place.

The same thing happened for the post-discharge calls element. The chief nurse for ambulatory care made sure the team didn’t just look at the calls themselves, but how they fit into the overall care pathway from admission to hospital to discharge and then self-care. Ultimately she made post-discharge calls into the feedback loop for the entire project. Anything the nurses learned on those calls would be fed back to the teams to improve care in the hospital.