Establish General Aims
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 focus on just one ward or service? On just one group of physicians? During one month or three month period? Again, we encourage a broad view of the scope of your efforts as affecting all inpatients with heart failure, but it may be reasonable to start small and then spread your improvement methods to other areas. On the other hand, even if the scope of your effort includes all patients in your hospital or system, 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 heart failure care for hospitalized patients.
- General aim 2: Decrease heart failure readmissions.
- General aim 3: Improve the heart failure core measures
- General aim 4: Increase the knowledge of caregivers in taking care of hospitalized heart failure patients
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 heart failure care do you want to improve first? What are the factors that lead to a readmission? Which of the heart failure core measures needs the most improvement? How do we educate caregivers about heart failure care?
TASK Establish general aims
Download the General Aims Task Sheet
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