BioMD Research and unit turnaround, 2023 to 2024
The method, built on a live unit.
The question was deliberately ambitious: can you simultaneously improve patient experience and staff engagement, in an acute unit under real pressure, using real-time analytics and co-design? The answer was yes, but not for the reasons we expected.
The work began with six months of leader rounding: management and senior leadership having daily conversations with patients and staff before any interventions were designed. A representative steering committee, including patient and Indigenous voices, frontline staff, and union representation, identified the most significant drivers. For patients, the drivers were being listened to and being involved in care decisions: daily What Matters to You conversations and bedside shift reporting. For staff, the drivers were workload manageability and a sense of community: continuous quality hiring, weekly PDSA cycles, and a real-time shift-level sentiment dashboard that generated 243 data points over twelve weeks.
Staff feeling negatively valued by leadership fell from 40% to 2% in 12 weeks. Patients always feeling listened to rose 32 points to 86%; patients always involved in care decisions rose 28 points to 93%. Engagement lifted two standard deviations into the top 5% of comparable units and held at 24 months.
EXTRA Fellowship, Healthcare Excellence Canada, funded by a hospital foundation grant, 2024. Published as the Healing Hospitals position paper, foreword by Graham Dickson, PhD, LEADS Global. Download the paper
- SettingTwo older-adult rehabilitation units in a provincial rehabilitation hospital
- RolePrincipal's frontline research; EXTRA Fellow
- MethodLeader rounding, co-design, real-time sentiment analytics
- Data243 shift-level data points, 12 weeks
- Follow-up24 months, sustained