Lesson Two: Find a team you can rely on when circumstances change<\/strong><\/h3>\n <\/p>\n
Although that project flopped due to lack of data, I soon got back to it. \u00a0My second QI project looked at errors in paediatric prescribing. I was asked by one of the consultants to keep track of prescribing errors so that we could find ways to improve the process. \u2018Awesome!\u2019 I thought. \u2018Who doesn\u2019t want to make prescribing safer?\u2019<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As it turned out, no one was interested in making prescribing safer if it meant they might be blamed (especially since the Bawa-Garba case was exploding in the media at the same time). No matter how much enthusiasm I brought to the project that was never going to overcome the fear people were feeling.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Our lack of data soon disheartened the group. No one was working on it, no one could be bothered to keep reminding people to fill out forms, and no one wanted to write an abstract.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Six months into the project I had a \u2018sit down\u2019 with each of my collaborators. I asked them why they had wanted to do the project in the first place, what they hoped to get out of it, and how hard they were prepared to work for those results. I wasn\u2019t surprised to find out they did it because they had to and they weren\u2019t prepared to do much since they had moved on from that placement and it was no longer their problem.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
At that point I gave up on the whole thing. In hindsight, I should have known that a team aiming for a quick and easy project would give up at the first hurdle and in future I would have this \u2018sit down\u2019 before<\/em> I started a project with anyone. I would be more exacting in deciding who I worked with to avoid wasting my \u00a0time. You can\u2019t just lead by example you have to demand excellence, or risk becoming the pushover who does all of the work.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Lesson Three: You can still learn from your failures<\/strong><\/h3>\n <\/p>\n
I still presented these two projects at departmental meetings regardless. Sure, I can\u2019t put my data collected from 9 people in an academic journal, but the department could learn from what I had observed. Eventually nursing staff were making a jobs list without being told and all the paediatricians were discussing what prevents us from learning from our mistakes. As Thomas Edison said when he was inventing the light bulb,<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u2018I have not failed. I\u2019ve just found 10,000 ways that won\u2019t work.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Conversations are the beginning of culture change and I was successful in starting a conversation. Or at least I think I was, but I have no data to prove it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dr Hannah Laidley, AFY2, University of Leicester Quality improvement work can feel inescapable. That\u2019s because it is; we have to do it to progress through the foundation programme. So we might as well make it work for us and get a poster presentation out of it. \u2018Easy!\u2019 I thought. Each PDSA cycle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":289,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[16,13,14,17,15],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bawa-garba","tag-failure","tag-leadership","tag-qi","tag-team-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/medicalleaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/medicalleaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/medicalleaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/medicalleaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/medicalleaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/medicalleaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/medicalleaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions\/45"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/medicalleaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/medicalleaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/medicalleaders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}