Background
Methods
Study design
Setting and timing
Respondents
Data collection
Data analysis
Results
Characteristics of respondents
Theme 1
The purpose of medication reconciliation is in a global way to provide safe care because when the patient comes into the hospital we’ve come to realize we need to have a firm understanding of the medications the patients have been taking at home, and the importance of it has risen (Nurse Manager).
It forces the provider to say is this drug therapy still consistent with the patient's current medical condition, should it be continued at this time or not, and should it be reinstituted when the patient goes home (Pharmacist Manager).
Facilitator | Barrier | CFIR construct(s) with short definition [13] |
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Theme 1: Consensus that purpose of medication reconciliation is to improve patient safety; respondents also had a broader view of its value
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Planners with a broad view of the process’ value | Individuals’ knowledge and beliefs about the intervention: “attitudes toward and value placed on the intervention as well as familiarity with facts, truths, and principles related to the intervention” [13] | |
External policy and incentives: “external strategies to spread interventions including policy and regulations (governmental or other central entity), external mandates, … and public or benchmark reporting” [13] | ||
Theme 2: Planning team’s membership and functioning recognized as facilitators to a successful planning process
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Planners who were or became champions of the process | Engaging champions: “’individuals who dedicate themselves to supporting, marketing, and “driving through” an [implementation]’, overcoming indifference or resistance that the intervention may provoke in an organization” [13] | |
Planners organizationally positioned to carry out the plan | Engaging individuals: “attracting and involving appropriate individuals in the implementation” [13] | |
Planners who were compelling leaders, who could get buy-in from front line staff | Engaging opinion leaders: “individuals in an organization who have formal or informal influence on the attitudes and beliefs of their colleagues with respect to implementing the intervention” [13] | |
Planners with openness to others’ perspectives and a willingness to compromise, to facilitate discussion and joint problem-solving | Learning climate: “climate in which leaders express their own fallibility and need for team members’ assistance and input; team members feel that they are essential, valued, and knowledgeable partners in the change process; individuals feel psychologically safe to try new methods; …sufficient time and space for reflective thinking and evaluation” [13] | |
Perseverance in obtaining resources | Lack of resources, staffing and/or budgetary support | Available resources: “the level of resources dedicated for implementation …including money, training, education, physical space, and time” [13] |
Multi-departmental participation in planning | Process planning: “the degree to which scheme[s] … for implementing an intervention are developed in advance and the quality of those schemes” [13] | |
Communication among team members, in or out of meetings | Poor team communication | Networks and communications: “the nature and quality of formal and informal communications within an organization” [13] |
Theme 3: Implementation facilitated by planners’ understanding of performance improvement, and fitting the new process into workflow
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Planners with an understanding of the basic tenets of performance improvement | Individuals’ other personal attributes: “personal traits such as tolerance of ambiguity, intellectual ability, motivation, values, competence, capacity, and learning style” [13] | |
Fitting the process into each discipline’s workflow | Compatibility: “how the intervention fits with existing workflows and systems” [13] | |
Assigning roles to multiple disciplines | Resistance to changing roles and/or scope of practice; enforcer is a negative role | Implementation climate: “The absorptive capacity for change, shared receptivity of involved individuals to an intervention” [13] |
Providing value to front-line providers to improve uptake | Relative advantage: “stakeholders’ perception of the advantage of implementing the intervention versus an alternative solution” [13] | |
Testing to optimize human-computer usability | IT staff may not be available or able to do testing | Trialability: “ability to test the intervention on a small scale in the organization, and to be able to reverse course” [13] |
Recognition that intervention should be refined based on reevaluation | Trialability (see above for definition) | |
Theme 4: Training recognized as important to sustaining the process, but training has limited effect on some individuals or groups
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Training all staff and tracking training | Staff turnover high; non-compliance not always solved by retraining | Available resources (see above for definition) |
Marketing campaign with slogan | Networks and communications (see above for definition) | |
Successful training approaches: peer-to-peer training; didactic with real case examples | Individuals’ knowledge and beliefs about the intervention (see above for definition) | |
Self-efficacy: “individuals’ belief in their own capabilities to execute course of action to achieve implementation goals” [13] | ||
Trainees’ experiencing first hand avoided errors to drive home importance | Work and other activities compete for trainees’ attention | Individual stage of change: “characterization of the phase an individual is in, as he or she progresses toward skilled, enthusiastic, and sustained use of the intervention” [13] |
Relative priority: “Individuals’ perception of the importance of the implementation” [13] | ||
Theme 5: Planners monitored compliance to help sustain the process, but this did not ensure achievement of reduced errors
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Monitoring of completion rates | Completion rates provide no data on health impact; lack of resources to gather such data | Executing: “carrying out or accomplishing the implementation according to plan” [13] |
Available resources (see above for definition) | ||
Feedback of monitoring results to providers; fostering competition to increase compliance | Dilemma that error reports could go up if the new process results in more recognition | Reflecting and evaluating: “quantitative and qualitative feedback about the progress and quality of implementation accompanied with regular personal and team debriefing about progress and experience” [13] |
Theme 2
Buy-in is extremely important - getting principals and strong people on the committee. People who are good at convincing …. You have to have a provider onboard if you expect the residents and the other attendings to go with it (Pharmacist Manager).
Theme 3
We used to have pharmacists work centrally and verify the orders remotely and we changed the paradigm and sent pharmacists to the floors. So now… every unit has a pharmacist during the day (Pharmacist Manager).
As a pharmacist, it's not in my scope of practice to decide this versus this. It's within my scope to make recommendation based on what I'm seeing but it's up to the provider in the end to make that final decision (Pharmacist Manager).
I think it promotes communication between the doctors and the nurses …. Many times patients tell nurses things they don’t tell doctors and vice versa (Nurse Manager).
We tried to offer something of value. For the physicians… no typing in meds or anything, its click, click, click, do a little editing and you get this beautiful discharge summary …. For the nurse, you don’t have to write down your own list on admission or on discharge, you just click, accept, and get what you need for patients…. I think that was pretty important to people that it helped them do the work they were already doing (Physician Manager).
Theme 4
They don’t see a value until they come across the case where they picked up a mistake and then they say, ‘Oh thank God we had this because look at what I caught.’ [When] they've had that firsthand experience of capturing something, that brings it home to them (Pharmacist Manager).
Training is training. Performance is performance. There's a link but you've got to be very careful in always blaming training…. at some point the adult learner has to take training and use it…. You've got to hold people accountable (Nurse Manager).
Theme 5
We’re not … doing what really … should be happening which is … a continuous process where we’re gathering data in a consistent way and measuring our progress against it and deciding whether that data is meaningful for patient care. It’s easy to gather numbers – compliance – but whether or not that means patient’s lives are better, or errors are reduced, is much harder (Another Physician Manager).