De-implementations: what should we stop doing, and how can leaders help?

The gap between capacity and demand in healthcare services is increasing. This situation requires careful prioritisation of capacity and resources and new ways of providing healthcare services.

As such, we need to maintain valuable practices, implement new practices, and de-implement low-value practices. The question for this workshop is what practices we should do less of in healthcare and how leaders can contribute to the process.

To ensure recruitment and retention of healthcare personnel, their workday must be designed to provide appropriate time and capacity to perform their job satisfactorily. Therefore, it is necessary to identify which of today’s healthcare tasks and practices are unnecessary or should be performed more efficiently. This means that we need to identify what we should do less of in healthcare.

How can we prioritize our resources better, and at the same time take into account the consequences this might have for patients and next of kin, the quality of healthcare services, and the wellbeing of healthcare personnel.

Leaders play a crucial role in this, and their involvement and listening to healthcare workers’ views are required to properly understand the situation and identify suggestions for improving it.

In this workshop, we aim to involve the audience in the following:

1) Identification of typical work practices that are inefficient, of low value, or worked around in everyday work.

2) Develop new ideas for what leaders can do to help workers reveal procedures or work practices that should be de-implemented and discuss what is needed for these processes to be psychologically safe and supportive.

The session is anchored in the European Union-funded project Support4Resilience. The project will develop, test, and evaluate a toolbox for leaders. The toolbox will focus on understanding work as done in healthcare and how leaders can engage healthcare workers and informal caregivers in supporting their work environment and reducing the capacity demands gap by de-implementing unnecessary or dysfunctional work practices.