Qi plus: Small steps towards a healthier clinical working environment
Key Trends:Insight: GP's peers hold the key to a better working environmentGuiding statement:How might we enable a clinic's staff to strengthen their relationships with each other?Solution overview:Digital sentiment monitoring systemQi VisualizationMicro-interventions and activities box kitProject learnings & reflections:
Key Trends:
Aging population & complex health issues
- Patients require more care from their providers, and more appointments
GP to patient ratio is worsening
- Number of GPs is decreasing
- Primary care system is used to take the burden off hospitals
- 12 hour days are common
Rise of Super Clinics
- Some clinics may have over 200,000 patients
- They provide better integration to make up for lack of qualified GPs
- Saving costs through economies of scale does not create a great working environment
High burnout rates among GPs
- 1/3 of GPs intend to leave the profession in the next 5 years
- Many GPs switching to part time to avoid burnout
- Social isolation is high due to long working hours and immense case-load
Insight: GP's peers hold the key to a better working environment
"GP's most important support system are their peers[...] it's hard to get that in a large clinic" Dr. Liz Lee, GP Partner
"We know that professional isolation is a common root cause for a practice underperforming" —Professor Steve Field, GP appraiser
"GPs are not very good at talking to each other, often feeling they don't have time to communicate" — Dr. Richard Wharton, Locum GP & Mentor
Guiding statement:
How might we enable a clinic's staff to strengthen their relationships with each other?
Solution overview:
Small solutions to create awareness among staff of the clinic's overall collective mood, with actionable ways to improve teamwork
Digital sentiment monitoring system
Your digital confidante. A way to talk about your feelings, checking it at different times of the day, or whenever you might have something to say
A natural language processing sentiment analysis algorithm is used to quantify answers and transform it into metrics for other pieces of the service
Answers are not stored, just the analysis, and they cannot be traced back to one person.
Qi Visualization
A script is used to visualize abstractly how the overall clinic is feeling. Meant to nudge workers, the logic behind the shapes will not be revealed to users, creating a fun game to try to "game the system.
Micro-interventions and activities box kit
A kit of activities is sent to the participating clinic every month, tailored to the issues they have been facing.
All activities are built to take less than 5 minutes to participate in, ensuring it fits into a busy work day
Learn more about the included activities
- Storytelling game
- Group art therapy
- Conversation starter cards
- Culture Health Calendar
- Storytelling game
Project learnings & reflections:
- Tech is not necessary for the solution to work; the kits do not need to be matched, just need to be delivered
- The solution is not only useful for GP practices but also for other working environments that suffer from high stress and low team cohesion.
- When working with employee experience projects, healthcare is always a great extreme user: things must work within a high pressure environment