Developing Standard Tools and Resources
Developing standard tools and resources can help facilitate the spread of engagement strategies and provide uniformity across departments, service lines or sites. Examples of tools and resources include training materials to orient staff as well as new patient and family advisors to the goals and purpose of the engagement effort, standard templates for participant outreach and onboarding, tips for effective meeting management, guidelines for participant supports and recognition programs and guidance on evaluation strategies.
Key steps for tool and resource development
- Engage staff as well as patient and family advisors who have already designed and implemented engagement strategies in other parts of your health care organization to discuss lessons learned and best practices. The goal of these conversations is to develop a list of potential challenges others in your organization may face when designing and implementing engagement strategies, summarize how these staff addressed these issues, and identify existing resources to be shared. These lessons could also be formalized into staff onboarding and training policies.
- Conduct a review of existing resources from outside organizations focused on engagement strategies. This review should focus on identifying other resources that could be added to the list made by internal staff and defining areas where there are resource gaps.
- Review any resource gaps and determine if the area is sufficiently important to warrant forming a team to develop a new resource in house.
- Select preferred resources and compile them into a package to share with others leading new engagement efforts around your organization.
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 engaged patients and staff experienced in engagement efforts to create a playbook for others trying to replicate our work.
- We have tracked and cataloged the resources our engagement groups have developed and the outside resources we have used to support our engagement efforts.
- We have a clear idea of the gaps in our existing resources and have a plan for developing new resources as needed.
