Organizational Change Data Collection and Analysis Plan

ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE

Data Collection and Plan for Analysis

The proposed project seeks to implement a mandatory medication safety education for clinical staff at the selected site. The project seeks to address the high incidence of medication errors at the clinical site by improving participants’ knowledge and attitudes towards medication errors. The education program will begin with nurses, and will be rolled out to physicians and pharmacists if found to be effective. As part of assessing the success of the project, the project team will carry out a pre and post-intervention evaluation exercise that will involve comparing staff knowledge and attitudes about medication safety before and after the project. This text details the data collection and analysis techniques that the project team plans to use to evaluate the project.

Data Collection and Analysis Plan

The project evaluation will involve two phases. The first phase will assess how participants’ knowledge and attitudes towards medication errors and medication safety change as a result of the education program. The second phase will compare the incidence of medication errors in the year of project implementation against past years to determine whether there has been a notable change.

Data for the first phase of evaluation will be collected using a questionnaire that will be administered online via the Survey Monkey platform. The questionnaire includes knowledge-based, attitude-based, and practice-related questions (Meher et al., 2015). The ten knowledge-based questions assess general knowledge about medication errors and medication safety practices, including what is a medication error, causes of medication errors, who can report medication errors, and the rights of medication administration. The seven attitude-based questions assess attitudes towards medication errors, including what one thinks about reporting errors, whether one believes reporting is beneficial, and what role nurses could play in reporting. Finally, the four practice questions assess what participants have encountered in their practice, such as whether they have seen or witnessed a medication error and whether they have played a role in reporting errors. The questionnaire was adopted from the study by Meher et al. (2015), which sought to assess knowledge, practice, and attitudes towards pharmacovigilance among undergraduate medical students in an Indian hospital.

Responses will be scored as follows: correct answers for each items will receive a score of 1, while incorrect answers and non-responses will receive a score of 0. The total possible score will be 10, 7, and 4 for knowledge-based, attitude-based, and practice questions respectively. Total scores of less than 50 percent will be graded as poor, between 50 and 69 percent will be graded as average, and above 70 percent will be graded as good performance. The clinical staff will receive the questionnaire a week before the start of the education program, and will be required to indicate their agreement to the consent provisions, fill the same out, and submit within five days. The same questionnaire will be administered immediately after the completion of the education program. The responses before and after the education program will be entered into an MS Excel spreadsheet and analyzed using SPSS by descriptive statistics, chi-square, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests. In the second phase, the project team will review electronic medical records and compare medication lists in patient records with actual medication use to determine the incidence of medication errors before and after the education program (Safholm et al., 2019). Descriptive statistics and ANOVA will be used for comparisons.

The adopted data collection and scoring system will provide information on the change in participants’ knowledge and attitudes towards medication errors and safety as a result of the education program. At the same time, the data from the reviewed medical records provides a view of the change in the incidence of medication errors at the facility before and after the project. To test the functionality and relevance of the questionnaire, the instrument was piloted among a group of nursing students within the student’s social circles. The findings of the pilot study showed that the questionnaire and the adopted scoring system were functional and relevant. Thus, the project team concludes that the scorecard is functional and measures what it was intended to measure.

Management of the Project Dashboard

The visual dashboard for the proposed project was developed based on the balanced scorecard (BSC) method (Victor & Farouq, 2021; Mailat et al., 2019). As part of managing the dashboard, the project team identified key performance indicators for each of the four BSC perspectives as follows (Victor & Farooq, 2021):

Financial: 20% increase in sales revenues from increased customer visits

Customer perspective: 25% increase in the patient satisfaction index

Learning and growth: increased Staff knowledge on medication safety, improved attitudes towards medication errors

Internal processes: 50% reduction in the incidence of medication errors per 100 patients

Based on the four KPIs, the project team settled on a staff education program on medication safety as the most plausible strategy. Consequently, these KPIs were communicated to all clinical staff to inform their individual and departmental targets in the year of project implementation. Every employee understands how their role contributes to the attainment of one or more of the following KPIs and each one is required to evaluate their individual performance based on the same KPIs. The change champions periodically meet their team members to track their progress in regard to the set KPIs and to offer supports and mentorship in tasks where team members may be experiencing difficulties that could hinder the attainment of the KPIs (White et al., 2019).