Using Story in Healthcare

¶ … Power of Story Story has a significant amount of power as an efficacious communication technique to move change forward. This statement particularly applies to the field of healthcare and to the sort of impact that nurses have on their healthcare organizations. Actuated by cogent stories, the sort of changes that can occur within these settings have both hard and soft elements -- each of which are required to effectively produce the sort of changes that can positively impact those involved in healthcare entities.

If implemented correctly, each of these different elements can form invaluable facilitators for change. It is important to realize that there is a relationship between the soft and hard elements of change that are produced from a compelling story. The soft elements of change generally take place prior to the hard elements of change. For the most part, soft elements of change involve a transition in the thinking of those in healthcare organizations.

This prioritization of these elements of change are necessary because changes in action require changes in thought, first. Stories are a way of informing the next generation of practitioners at a care facility (Hiltz, 2013). Viewed from this point-of-view, soft changes are changes in thoughts about situations and potential activities. Hard changes, then, are the actual changes in action, method, and practice that ultimately reap the benefit from powerful stories that inspire transformation. Soft elements of change, or those that involve changes in thinking, are certainly facilitators for change.

One of the most prominent of these elements is a general awareness of certain consequences or situations that healthcare practitioners previously did not give enough consideration (Hiltz, 2013). Focus is another important soft element of change, as stories can produce situations in which those who listen to them and utilize them as examples focus on aspects of care that may have previously been neglected.

Attention is another aspect of a change in thinking, as those who are aware of and focused on different parts of the process for care are forced to pay attention to parts of their jobs that they might not necessarily have before. Each of these elements is a facilitator for change in that they serve as precursors to action.

Employees that are aware of situations requiring change, focused on them, and giving them due attention are able to take action to create the sort of change necessary to engender the desirable outcomes that stories can inspire. The hard elements of change are those which involve direct action and take on the form of change that story can motivate in the health care industry. Nonetheless, there are certain types of action that can accompany a healthcare organization that is attempting to effect change.

Some action is evinced in the form of changes in policy. Specifically, it is possible for management to create new procedures that employees must adhere to that will help to guide the sort of change that a particular story has inspired. In extreme instances, this action can take the form of hiring new employees, or perhaps creating new positions, that are aligned with the sort of organization-wide change for which stories are responsible.

In some instances, hard elements of change merely require a reform in procedures and methodology to account for some aspect of remissness that a story has highlighted. As is the case with the identified soft elements of change, each of these hard elements of change are facilitators for change in that they create new standards for employee behavior.

Whether an organization has modified its policies, personnel, or procedures, it is doing so to alter employee behavior in such a way that is consistent with the aims of the story that has inspired change (Wortmaan, 2008). A particularly compelling story that I can use to move stakeholders to support change pertains to a greater incorporation of data-driven practices in the health care industry.

Specifically, there are a number of developments in the health care industry in which precision medicine (in the form of the Precision Medicine Initiative), wearable devices, and the incorporation of analytics is helping to targeting care at the individualized patient level. Thus, one of the most notable stories that I can tell to effect change involves the tale that the Chief Executive Officer of Franz, Inc. relayed about the son of his friend who was had serious healthy problems. This six-year-old had previously been diagnosed with both asthma and dermatitis.

Not long ago, he took his first spoonful of peanut butter and ended up in the emergency room of a hospital. By all accounts, the medical personnel was just barely able to save his life. However, the noteworthy part of this story is that when his physician was going through his medical charts after his recovery, he told the boy's father that it was actually predictable that the child would have peanut allergies. Apparently, there is a correlation between asthma, dermatitis, and peanut allergies.

The medical personnel had previously tested the child for two of those three conditions, and should have alerted the child and his parents as well that he would likely have peanut allergies. The CEO was able to utilize predictive analytics and visual querying to confirm the relationships between these conditions, and has implemented a.