Home About Us Our Expertise (What we do) Courses Training and Events

Safe Care - Behaviour Change

The Improvement Academy has expertise in applying behaviour change methods to sticky quality improvement challenges. This is available through regular one-day workshops and expert support, and is the product of a long-standing collaboration between the Improvement Academy and academic applied researchers with national expertise in the psychology of behaviour change; including Yorkshire Quality and Safety Research Group.

Many things we do in healthcare to improve safety, such as the introduction of new guidelines and technologies require NHS staff to change their behaviour. It is often assumed that this is easy – tell people what to do and they will do it. But, behaviour change can be difficult to achieve. In this work we help healthcare teams to Achieve Behaviour Change by applying tried and tested theories from psychology.

Research evidence tells us that interventions based on theories of behaviour change are more effective. However, these theories are often not accessible to healthcare professionals and managers who are responsible for making change happen.

What have we done about it?

Behaviour change theory became accessible to both researchers and health care practitioners alike when a group of psychologists within the British Psychological Society developed the Theoretical Domains Framework (Michie et al.’s 2005).

We have taken this framework and used it to develop a six stepped approach to behaviour change. This involves:

Establishing an implementation team supported by the executive team
Identifying a target behaviour
Understanding the barriers to change
Developing intervention strategies that address these barriers
Implementing change
Evaluation

A programme of research has demonstrated the success of this approach (Taylor et al., 2014), and since 2014 the Improvement Academy has helped teams across the region to engage in their own behaviour change project by:

Hosting one-day behaviour change workshops, since 2014 these have been attended by more than 300 delegates including patient safety leads, improvement specialists, doctors, nurses and managers
Developing an ABC Behaviour Change Toolkit and making it freely available online. The toolkit offers direction and examples for every step of the behaviour change journey
Offering post-workshop support to encourage the adoption of this approach for individual patient safety improvement projects

Create your custom blocks or add 50+ components from our improved page builder.

Explore our expertise:

Improvement Academy has worked collaboratively with patients, clinicians and academics to refine our approach and develop expertise in disciplines that are essential for successful improvement in contemporary healthcare.

Based on Deming’s Principles of Improvement, our flexible approach is applied in partnership with patients, clinicians and academics to tackle the most difficult areas of healthcare improvement.

Behaviour Change

Human Factors

Implementation
Science

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with our latest news, events and resources.

Courses

Explore our expertise:

Contact

Contact

Pages

Home

About us

Expertise

Contact Us

News

Pages

Resources

Courses, Training & Events

Resources

Newsletter