Case studies

Sioux Lookout Meno Ya Win Health Centre (SLMHC) is a pre-designate Best Practice Spotlight Organization® (BPSO®) in Sioux Lookout, a town in Northwestern Ontario. SLMHC is a hub for inpatient and outpatient hospital services, providing services to including Sioux Lookout and 28 northern communities. The service area is remote, isolated and encompasses 385,000 square kilometres, with a population that is 85 per cent First Nations.

As part of its pre-designation process, the SLMHC change team implemented the Person- and Family- Centred Care (PFCC) best practice guideline (BPG). During implementation, the SLMHC change team worked to adapt the PFCC BPG to the local context of their organization in order to best serve the needs of the population in the surrounding areas as well as in other remote communities.

The SLMCH local context posed unique challenges. Among these:

• Standard guidance on privacy did not always apply to members of the First Nations communities served. Some members wished to have their health information shared with their chief and community.
• Some people must travel as far as 400 or 500 kilometers to return home after discharge from SLMHC. Thus, it was essential to arrange appropriate care transitions and make sure people being discharged would not lose personal belongings.

The SLMHC change team adapted the PFCC BPG to the local context by:

SLMHC Patient Oriented Discharge Summary. Shared with permission.   

• placing names on the doors of the hospital rooms of some individuals, so their community members could stop by and visit.
• creating a Patient Oriented Discharge Summary (PODS) that included the following options to indicate the person’s preferences regarding sharing their health information:

• I agree to my health information being shared with________
• I do not agree with my health information being disclosed to people in my community (for example, band or council) 
• creating a detailed staff checklist within the PODS to ensure safe care transitions (by, for example, faxing the completed form to an external Indigenous Transition Navigator, or listing personal items collected from the room).

• working with an Indigenous Transitions Facilitator, whose roles include conducting follow-up phone calls with the person, patient rounding, and coordinating safe transitions.

After successfully creating a tailored PODS that meets the need of the population they serve, SLMHC has been able to better support person- and family-centred care principles within the organization.

Shared with permission by Sioux Lookout Meno Ya Win Health Centre

Toronto Public Health – a Best Practice Spotlight Organization® (BPSO®) in Toronto, Canada – has implemented several RNAO best practice guidelines (BPGs), including Woman Abuse: Screening, Identification and Initial Response (2005) and Preventing and Addressing Abuse and Neglect of Older Adults (2014). Because some practice recommendations in these guidelines focus on the individual person or patient level, they didn’t always align with Toronto Public Health’s population health approach.

To adapt recommendations to the public health context, the change team completed a literature review to explore definitions and adapt strategies to align with the model of care delivery and health promotion philosophy.

Another approach that was taken by Toronto Public Health: piloting BPG recommendations within one small program team. The team would then evaluate the implementation until successful, consistent with the Plan-Do-Study-Act approach). Once successful, the intervention was scaled up within the organization to other programs and teams (Timmings et al., 2018).

DongZhiMen Hospital – a BPSO in Beijing China – was motivated to reform care delivery through the use of RNAO BPGs. While best practice recommendations provided general guidance, DongZhimen Hospital identified the need to translate these statements into detailed instructions and parameters tailored to their specific hospital context.

To adapt statements to their context, they translated the guideline into Chinese. A multidisciplinary team then worked through the initial steps of the Knowledge-to-Action Framework. This involved:

• reviewing carefully the evidence to thoroughly understand the intent of the recommendations
• conducting a comprehensive gap analysis
• interviewing staff members and others to identify facilitators and barriers to the use of the BPG.

Using this information, the team was able to create specific, clinical nursing practice standards derived from the recommendations and relevant to their context (Hailing and Runxi, 2018).