Kurt Lewin Change Model for Nursing Technology Upgrades
This paper addresses the challenge of implementing a technology upgrade in a healthcare organization where medication errors have remained steady or slightly increased despite new portable electronic devices being introduced to nursing staff. The author applies Kurt Lewin's three-stage planned change model — unfreezing, moving, and refreezing — to propose a concrete strategy. Key recommendations include mandatory physician use of electronic prescribing, a redesigned color-coding system for medication conflicts, and a redundancy protocol. The paper aligns these changes with organizational mission, professional nursing standards, and existing research on successful technology adoption in healthcare settings.
- Problem Statement: Medication errors persist despite new portable device rollout
- Realistic Change to Address the Issue: Color-coding and mandatory e-prescribing proposed as solutions
- Aligning the Change with Organizational Mission: Proposal linked to patient safety and professional standards
- The Kurt Lewin Change Model: Three-stage model chosen for simplicity despite resistance gap
- Implementing the Change: Step-by-step rollout with staff roles and timelines
- References: APA-formatted sources on nursing technology and change
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What makes this paper effective
- It grounds the change proposal in a concrete, measurable problem — sustained medication errors — rather than abstract organizational dissatisfaction, giving the argument immediate clinical relevance.
- Each recommendation (color-coding overhaul, mandatory e-prescribing, redundancy protocols) is explicitly tied back to both the Lewin model stage and the organization's stated mission, creating a coherent through-line.
- The paper balances theoretical framing with practical, step-by-step implementation details, including staffing roles, timelines, and quality-assurance checkpoints.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied theory use: it selects a well-known management framework (Lewin's model) and maps specific, real-world interventions onto each stage rather than describing the theory in isolation. Critically, the author also acknowledges the model's limitation — its underestimation of staff resistance — showing evaluative thinking rather than uncritical acceptance of a single framework.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a problem statement establishing context and urgency, followed by a specific change proposal with measurable components. A brief alignment section connects the proposal to organizational values and professional standards. The theoretical section introduces and critiques the Lewin model. An implementation section then breaks the three Lewin stages into numbered steps with assigned staff roles. The paper closes with a reference list in APA format. This structure mirrors a standard nursing administration policy memo, appropriate for the graduate healthcare management audience.
Problem Statement
Planned change is necessary in the healthcare setting. Described as "purposeful, calculated, and collaborative," planned change helps prepare nursing staff for new technology or new processes, ensuring safe and effective implementation (Mitchell, 2012, p. 32). The issue addressed here is technology upgrades within a healthcare organization. Nurse administrators would like to invest in portable electronic devices for all nursing staff, which would enhance quality of care and promote accuracy and efficiency — values embedded in the mission and goals of the organization (Leape, Rogers, Hanna, et al., 2006). However, the technology has not been implemented properly because underlying processes and procedures have not yet changed. What is needed is a change management strategy that builds on Kurt Lewin's model of unfreezing, moving forward, and refreezing. Ultimately, the change needs to result in transformed norms of behavior.
Medication errors had been either steady or even slightly increasing over the past two years in this organization. To respond to this problem, administrators investigated a number of system upgrades to patient databases and electronic health records. The nursing staff already received proper training on how to use the new portable devices, which are linked to centralized databases and client software installed on all station computers. Administrators believed this training would be sufficient to implement the new technology, but it was not; medication errors remain a problem.
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