Our LISN course held at Royal Children’s Hospital

September 26, 2019

 

The Learning Improvement Science (LISN) course, which has been running for the last four years and is offered free to all Northern Health staff, has been delivered at another hospital for the first time.

LISN teaches the fundamentals of process improvement by breaking the problem down bit by bit and showcasing how small changes can make a big difference to the system.

“In health care, we are solution focused, while this workshop aims to find the root cause of the problem. We do it in a tangible way so people can go back to their workplace and improve processes,” explains Ariana Carrodus, Acting Director Project Management Office and HRO Transformation Unit.

The Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) hosted Ariana and Brooke Williams, Project Support Officer, who, in partnership with RCH staff, co-delivered this training to 32 senior nursing staff.

LISN is an action learning workshop built around a simulation of Day Procedure Unit (DPU) where multiple improvement cycles are conducted to improve patient’s clinical outcomes, reduce documentation errors, while at the same time improving access and efficiency.

Simon Lane, Improvement Capability Lead at RCH, explains he was working at Northern Health from 2015-2017 when this improvement course was introduced and found it to be an extremely effective way for understanding what improvement is.

“These improvements typically focus on very small changes that can have large impacts on things like quality and access. The RCH have been sending staff to Northern from 2017 and, since then, we have co-facilitated these workshops,” he said.

“We identified the need for this training at RCH because we are working on improvement projects and we understand that staff need to lead improvements, rather than being told what to do. Ariana and the team have done two single-day workshops at RCH and some of the participating staff said this was the best professional development workshop they’ve experienced,” Simon said.

Participants are shown how to make small problems visible in their workspace and given the tools, eyes and language to identify problems and resolve them.

“The workshop encourages productive and open conversation around problems so that people feel empowered to bring them up and root causes can be found and addressed,” he explained.

The last two LISN sessions for the year will be held on 18 October and 13 November 2019 at Northern Health.

Please email lisn.hro@nh.org.au if you would like to attend. Anyone can participate and the course is also offered to other industries and health services.

Dates for 2020 are coming soon.