Lucas, B., & Nacer, H. (2015). The habits of an improver: Thinking about learning for improvement in health care. Health Foundation.
For several decades we have known about the importance of education which builds improvement capability. But, looking across the professions and occupations that plan and deliver health and social care services in the NHS, it is clear that there is too much variation in the quality and scope of provision.
While some health and social care professionals receive formal training for improvement, many receive nothing, either as part of their initial training or as subsequent professional development. There are no common approaches with regard to the desirable behaviours of those working in health care or the kinds of knowledge and skill domains which are helpful, or the learning methods which are most effective.
At a time of heightened interest in education and training, this paper offers curriculum designers and all those providing initial or continuing professional development a new way of thinking about education for improvement.
I haven’t read the book at the link above, but it was shared by a conference participant whose opinion is worth paying attention to (IMO). So, I’m sticking a flag in the sand with this post to highlight it for follow-up.
I think the health professions could learn a lot from software developers, and the frameworks they’ve developed to build software products that constantly improve over time. Software developers invented agile methodologies to guide projects that typically involve large numbers of individual contributions, over a wide range of domains, with a low tolerance for error, that often have high-stakes outcomes.
For example, software developers, especially those using agile methodologies, have the principle of ship early, then iterate. There’s the belief that the person shipping an early, unfinished version of a product is creating more value than the person waiting to build something finished and perfect. That’s why we have alpha and beta software builds. You could argue that we need to be careful about using untested software for mission-critical functions, and I’d agree. I’m just saying that there are existing frameworks and processes, which we could adapt in higher education, to promote a culture of iterative improvement.