The ability to engage in systems thinking is a key component in
a successful delivery of safe and high quality healthcare.
In fact, systems thinking may be as important as critical thinking.
How healthcare professionals experience themselves in their work,
is shaped by the structure and processes of the systems in which they work.
Most professionals provide care in healthcare organizations that are complex,
multi-level, and multi-functional.
In your day-to-day work, your ability to engage in better problem solving,
priority setting, interactions and collaborations and
decision making, is greatly influenced by your ability to understand how any
one component of your work system is related to the whole of that system.
This is particularly true for yourselves who aim to improve health care systems.
But how well do you see and understand the systems around you?
There are a set of skills to learn about, understand, and improve systems.
You'll have the opportunity in this course to learn about and
use some of these skills.
Specifically the use of flow charts and fish bone diagrams.
These tools, and
others that you'll be introduced to, can be applied to any system.
A personal one, or the ones in your workplace.
You may want to try these tools first, to change a personal system in your life.
Such as getting more sleep,
eating healthier foods at lunch,
or having some more time for leisure type reading.
I teach systems thinking in the use of these tools to school age children to
change the habits in their daily lives to be more healthy.
Habits are systems, and our daily routines are often some of the systems that
we least recognize, understand, or go about changing in a deliberate way.
I've found that children as young as ten years old are able to learn about and
use flow charting of their daily routines, in order to understand them better.
And that children also use fish bone diagrams to consider possible
influences on their routines, and discover changes in them that could be healthier,
such as eating, sleeping, and getting exercise.
These children, and their families, have been quite successful at
using the process improvement techniques to improve their healthy living habits.
But, getting back to health care organizations,
some questions associated with systems thinking that you might consider are...
How do systems drive behavior?