From “The habits of an improver: Thinking about learning for improvement in health care” by Bill Lucas with Hadjer Nacer. (c) 2015 by The Health Foundation.

We in the Society for Participatory Medicine are in many stages of awakening to our potential as active participants in the health system. Some have a particular focus on a disease or a technology; many of us come to it through our own experience (good or bad) as a patient or carer; some of us, after years of consideration, have become interested in how to create lasting change in the health system, locally or worldwide.

In the category of being a change agent, I was thrilled to discover this compelling graphic in a 2015 UK report “The habits of an improver: Thinking about learning for improvement in health care.” From the executive summary:

The habits of an improver offers a way of viewing the field of improvement from the perspective of the men and women who deliver and co-produce care on the ground, the improvers on whom the NHS depends. It describes 15 habits which such individuals regularly deploy, grouped under five broad headings – learning, influencing, resilience, creativity and systems thinking. It goes on to suggest that there is a ‘signature pedagogy’ of improving quality, that is to say that there are certain teaching and learning methods which best develop capability in understanding and implementing improvement.

It’s a free download, a 36 page report on the Health.org.uk site.

We’ll be discussing this on our new SPM Connect discussion platform.  You can join our society here to participate.