Have you ever wondered why your quality improvement (QI) initiatives don’t take off? Many health care leaders have asked the same question. There seems to be a lot of confusion at times, who is responsible for quality, and how some of the quality activities overlap among staff. It is also true that staff can experience Quality Fatigue. In a blog by Health Affairs in 2014, they talked about “Risk of Initiative Fatigue”. The blog covered the risk of fatigue or overloading staff with multiple initiatives and/or quality projects at the same time. “At the system level, there is a risk of initiative fatigue. Staff has to do so many projects and if the culture isn’t there – adding more projects is just not a good thing to do.”

How can a healthcare organization prioritize different QI initiatives without risking staff burn out or fatigue? Let´s go over a few tips that will help you streamline and prioritize your QI initiatives:

• Identify the core team that will tackle the quality transformation challenge.
• Understand your quality program by doing an assessment to discover strength and weak areas. This could be, not having the right people responsible for your quality program or activities.
• Analyze your quality assessment findings and strategize what issues should be addressed based on priority and resources.
• Share the quality assessment results with your staff, for instance at a town hall meeting (in-person/virtual), email blast, or at your quality meeting.
• Have a brainstorming session with key staff about potential solutions and strategies.
• Prioritize what quality initiatives you want to focus on, based on relevance, weight, impact, and available resources.
• Keep initiatives achievable, realistic, and focus.

As a leader, you need to decide which quality initiatives you want your staff to take on and why? What is the reason for the initiative, how much resources are going to be used, how is it going to impact the bottom – line of the organization, and the staff satisfaction? These are questions that you need to ask yourself before taking on any quality initiative.