EPOC implementation subcategory | Definitiona | Examples |
---|---|---|
Organisational culture | Strategies to change organisational culture | Multidisciplinary teams, steering committees, regular briefings, leadership/leaders’ involvement |
Audit and feedback | A summary of health workers’ performance over a specified period of time, given to them in a written, electronic or verbal format. The summary may include recommendations for clinical action | Feedback sessions, personal performance feedback, posting SSI or compliance rates |
Clinical incident reporting | System for reporting critical incidents | Critical Incident Reporting Systems |
Monitoring the performance of the delivery of healthcare | Monitoring of health services by individuals or healthcare organisations, for example by comparing with an external standard | Monitoring compliance with SSI preventive measures, monitoring SSI incidence |
Communities of practice | Groups of people with a common interest who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis | Regional hospital collaboration to regularly exchange knowledge and improve quality |
Continuous quality improvement | An iterative process to review and improve care that includes involvement of healthcare teams, analysis of a process or system, a structured process improvement method or problem solving approach, and use of data analysis to assess changes | Regular meetings to review compliance with preventive measures and when necessary to eliminate barriers to improve quality of care |
Educational games | The use of games as an educational strategy to improve standards of care | Video games, smartphone-based games, quizzes |
Educational materials | Distribution to individuals, or groups, of educational materials to support clinical care, i.e., any intervention in which knowledge is distributed. For example this may be facilitated by the internet, learning critical appraisal skills; skills for electronic retrieval of information, diagnostic formulation; question formulation | Posters, newsletters, bulletins |
Educational meetings | Courses, workshops, conferences or other educational meetings | Educational sessions, educational lectures, grand round lectures, workshops |
Educational outreach visits, or academic detailing | Personal visits by a trained person to health workers in their own settings, to provide information with the aim of changing practice | Site visits by a trained healthcare professional to educate groups or individuals |
Clinical Practice Guidelines | Clinical guidelines are systematically developed statements to assist healthcare providers and patients to decide on appropriate health care for specific clinical circumstances’(US IOM) | Developing a new clinical practice guideline, choosing evidence-based guidelines |
Inter-professional education | Continuing education for health professionals that involves more than one profession in joint, interactive learning | Interdisciplinary education |
Local consensus processes | Formal or informal local consensus processes, for example agreeing a clinical protocol to manage a patient group, adapting a guideline for a local health system or promoting the implementation of guidelines | Clinical practice guideline development with agreeing from all levels |
Local opinion leaders | The identification and use of identifiable local opinion leaders to promote good clinical practice | Involvement of project officers, study champions |
Managerial supervision | Routine supervision visits by health staff | Supervision by managerial staff |
Patient-mediated interventions | Any intervention aimed at changing the performance of healthcare professionals through interactions with patients, or information provided by or to patients | Patient feedback, patients as committee members |
Public release of performance data | Informing the public about healthcare providers by the release of performance data in written or electronic form. | Publicly accessible websites that provide performance reports |
Reminders | Manual or computerised interventions that prompt health workers to perform an action during a consultation with a patient, for example computer decision support systems | Checklists, automatic electronic reminders, protocols |
Routine patient-reported outcome measures | Routine administration and reporting of patient-reported outcome measures to providers and/or patients | Assessing patients’ experience of symptoms through questionnaires before and after interventions |
Tailored interventions | Interventions to change practice that are selected based on an assessment of barriers to change, for example through interviews or surveys | Developing implementation interventions based on previously identified barriers |