Establish General Aims

Establishing good goals is essential for maintaining focus and motivating the team.

Eventually your aims should be specific, measurable, and time defined and should specify the population or populations for whom you want to improve care. A “stretch” goal should be established that should be aggressive enough to mandate a change in the design of your current process in order to achieve it. Until you have reliable metrics and a baseline evaluation, however, team-supported general aims or goals can be important for galvanizing action and establishing clarity of purpose.

One important task is to define the scope of your efforts. Do you want to limit your efforts to the core CMS measures and/or the PQRI measures, or do you want to expand beyond these almost certain requisite goals. Again, we encourage a broad view of the scope of your efforts as affecting all aspects of the care of the patients with ACS, but it may be reasonable to start small and then spread your improvement methods to other areas. On the other hand, whatever the scope of your effort, the interventions you choose should be piloted on a small scale when possible. The bottom line is this: think BIG! Don’t bite off more than you can chew initially, but serial testing and learning on a small scale can make even very large projects more manageable.

Examples of general aims

• General aim 1: Substantially improve ACS treatment/care for hospitalized patients.
• General aim 2: Decrease ACS readmissions.
• General aim 3: Improve the ACS core measures.
• General aim 4: Increase the knowledge of caregivers about taking care of hospitalized ACS patients.
• General aim 5:Improve knowledge and education of patients and health care providers about ACS management.

As your team develops, your challenge will be to define many of the terms in your general aim, which will entail developing defined metrics and more mature, specific, time-defined aims. For example, what aspects of ACS care do you want to improve first? What are the factors that lead to a readmission? Which of the ACS core measures needs the most improvement? How do we educate caregivers about ACS care?

TASK   

Establish general aims

Download the task sheet