The Ideal Story - A Real-Life Example, Part 1
The Ideal Story is a co-design tool that does more than simply get feedback. The Ideal Story engages your team in the improvement process. Whether it’s a team of frontline caregivers, patients, administrators or any combination, it pulls your group into the story behind the experience.
Let’s face it - every healthcare worker has stories. Some are good. Some are tragic. Many are infused with joy. Others are plagued with thoughts of how it could or should have gone differently. No matter the tone or outcome, each story is an experience, and it is these experiences that we all want to improve.
The first step to improving experiences is often deciding what you’re aiming for, and this is where the ideal story comes in. Read on to discover how one team wrote their Ideal Story, and find an easy-to-use Ideal Story Worksheet here.
Divide and conquer.
The Ideal Story activity can be conducted in many different ways. The team in this example wrote their story by dividing their care experience (an outpatient ophthalmology office visit) into logical “segments.”
Check-in at the desk
Waiting in the waiting room
Being placed in an exam room
Having health history and vitals taken by the nurse
Moving to the imaging area for testing
Back in the exam room to see the doctor
Check-out at the desk
With these segments as a framework, the team got to work imagining the care experience from the point of view of a patient. What should happen? What should not happen? What should be eliminated or added to create an experience that the patient would call ideal?
Break down the silos.
The Ideal Story is meant to be fun and energizing. It is designed to tap into the creative energy of your team and to break everyone out of negative thinking patterns.
The team in our example kept it light and fun by dividing into small groups and assigning a segment to each group. Groups weren’t necessarily made up of people who worked in that segment and that was fine - because the story is written from the perspective of the patient. Every person working on the story had interacted with patients and families and had ideas of what worked and what didn’t. More importantly, every person had been a patient or the family member of a patient and could identify the good and the not-so-good.
Think “blue sky.”
The small groups had 20 minutes and 3 ground rules:
Imagine care that is free from barriers, restrictions or limitations.
Tell us what you’d do if you had all the staff, all the space and all the resources you needed to deliver a great experience.
Write from the patient’s perspective.
Piece it all together.
At the end of 20 minutes, the small groups came back together to share their stories. The group with the first segments (check-in and waiting) read their story while a facilitator recorded key words and phrases on a dry-erase board. When the first group finished, the next group shared their story, the facilitator recorded, and so on until all groups had gone. What resulted was not only a complete experience in story form, but a team that was energized by the challenge of thinking outside the box. Because they weren’t asked to solve problems or fill gaps, they got carried away with the task of generating ideas. They took full advantage of the opportunity to imagine care that represented their personal and professional values, and they wrote an Ideal Story that reflected those values.
Identify your projects.
Using the keywords and themes pulled from the Ideal Story, the team created a project list that included:
Paperless Check-in,
Service-based Care Pods,
Coat Hooks for Exam Room Doors,
and more!
They prioritized the projects - starting with a focus on “low-hanging” fruit, then moving to heavier lifts. To show the value of each proposed project, the team used the PCVS Project Plan to connect their ideas to larger organizational initiatives. With that template, each project had a visible tie to at least one of their four goals impacting quality, service, people or finance.
Change with time.
As the team began the work of implementing person-centered improvements, they recognized that no care experience is (or should be) static. They set a date to re-visit their Ideal Story in six months. During the re-visit, the team would read their Ideal Story and decide:
Are we heading in the right direction?
Are we creating an experience that is ideal for patients and families?
Are we supporting employees in delivering ideal care?
Has anything in our environment changed that is now creating a barrier?
How are we evaluating experiences in real time?
Reconnect with the Ideal Story.
The Ideal Story is a co-design activity that taps into the heart of caregiving. It connects us to the stories of patients, families and frontline employees. It connects us to the joy and the humor and the empathy that fuel our professional lives. It reignites the passion for caregiving and reminds us that we have the knowledge, the ideas and the power to create experiences that change lives.
Use this simple co-design tool to engage your team and discover the powerful connections between people and their stories.