Your survey results are in. You’ve identified your top improvement opportunities, shared the results with your team, and developed an action plan. Once improvement plans are underway, it’s tempting to wait until your next survey to find out if all your hard work has paid off. Go the extra mile and monitor improvement efforts while they are happening. This proactive approach will provide assurance that your efforts are making a difference or will give you an early heads up that a change in direction is needed before the next survey is launched, making it more likely that your improvement goals will be met and recognized.
Here are three easy tools you can use to track the impact of improvement efforts while they are happening in your community.
1. Tally sheets
A simple tally sheet can be used to record directly observable events such as service times, number of times something occurs, or successful completion of a task. This is a good choice for monitoring services or tasks that occur one or more times throughout the day. Examples: medication distribution, plating and serving of meals, resident reminders.
2. Pulse Surveys
Conduct a short pulse survey to measure the opinions of your residents or team members and get real time feedback. Pulse surveys are a good choice as a supplement to tally sheets and for monitoring improvement efforts that cannot be directly observed. Examples: quality of meals, responsiveness of care staff, evaluation of a staff training program.
3. Progress Charts
Progress charts help you track performance over time. They can be used to evaluate your tally sheet data and survey responses across days, weeks, and months. Examples: dining service times plotted across a one week period, resident ratings of social events plotted across a six month period.
Click the link below to download some pre-formatted templates you can start using today. They can be easily modified to your individual needs. Each template is provided on a separate tab in the Excel file. Happy monitoring!