Creating Scalable Engagement Policies
Organizational engagement policies should provide clear goals for scaling engagement strategies while allowing individual departments, service lines, or delivery sites the flexibility to adapt engagement approaches to their specific context.
Key actions for scaling engagement efforts
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Emphasize balancing uniformity with flexibility when designing patient engagement policies for your organization.
Note from the Field
To support efforts to implement PFACs, Trinity Health has worked with the most experienced of their member hospitals to develop a PFAC toolkit. The toolkit provides background on the value and benefits of PFACs and provides guidelines and templates for participant recruitment and application processes, orientation and training materials, and recommendations for rewards and recognition gifts. In recognition of the need for flexibility at the local level, the specific approach to implementing the PFACs are ultimately determined by each local member health system.
- Meet with staff and patient and family advisors/leaders that have already implemented engagement strategies and those interested in implementing engagement strategies to share best practices and identify specific areas where standard policies would be most useful.
- Set clear goals for engagement. Generally, engagement goals should focus on outcomes (for example: successfully launching a specific number of PFACs, or receiving and acting on patient feedback on all new construction or remodeling projects) while leaving flexibility in the specific process used to meet the goal. This allows sites/service lines/departments to modify engagement strategies to meet the needs of their specific service areas or patient populations.
- Build diversity considerations into the framework of engagement policies. Leverage the concepts highlighted in the diversity and inclusion section of this change package to incorporate best practices into engagement scaling efforts by default.
Self-Assessment Questions
On a scale of 1 to 5 (with 1 indicating “strongly disagree” and 5 indicating “strongly agree”), rate your organization’s performance on the following questions:
- My organization has clear expectations and measurable goals for the implementation of engagement strategies across the entire organization.
- My organization encourages each service line/department/site to customize their approach to engagement to fit the needs of the patients they work with.
- My organization actively supports the sharing of lessons learned and connects staff and patient form mature engagement efforts to those with less experience.
