Improving Patient Outcomes with Staff Competency & Skills Development

4 Ways You Can Start Empowering Your Team

Your health care team’s goal is to provide patient-centered care that’s efficient, safe, and effective. But often, you’re tasked with doing this amidst fast-paced technological advancements, staff shortages or turnover issues, and rising expectations from your leadership team. So how does improving patient outcomes with staff competency play a role?

Let’s look at steps you can take now to improve your competency program to make it more effective and enhance patient outcomes.

#1. Make It Personal

Continuous learning in health care teams has more impact when it’s personalized. Bridging health care skills gaps is also more effective and efficient when you’re tailoring competency training to the specific skill sets of individuals or teams.

Doing so ensures you’re equipping staff members with the skills they need most. Plus, you’re not wasting their time with generalized education that doesn’t help advance them professionally or actually impact the way they provide patient care.

Alongside that, if you also set up spaced learning touchpoints, you’re more likely to see improved patient outcomes along with a host of other benefits, according to a systematic review.

In a recent study, researchers found that through spaced-out and ongoing competency education:

• 10 studies showed clinicians having significant increases in knowledge
• 7 showed reported changes in clinician behavior
• 4 showed increases in clinician confidence
• And 3 showed increases in clinical skills

Ultimately, boosting confidence will go a long way in how your team cares for patients. They are more likely to provide excellent care because they feel equipped not just to do their job, but to do it well.

How Can You Personalize Your Health Care Workforce Development Strategy? 

If you’re looking for a way to implement this practically, Creative Health Care Insight (CHCI) is a cloud-based platform with a robust Competency Suite. It’s the only software on the market that’s been co-designed with ​​Donna Wright with exclusive access to the Wright Competency Assessment Model™. (It also can accommodate your competency program, even if you don’t use that model.) Best of all, it can make it easy to personalize competency without adding more work for your preceptors.

One of the best aspects of CHCI’s Competency Suite is how much you can customize it. You can tailor employee development training for individuals, teams, or the entire organization and set up deadlines that keep everyone accountable. 

This allows you to personalize training as much as you need to for individuals or ensure everyone is meeting the milestones necessary for national designations, like Magnet® or Pathway to Excellence®. Taking this step will ultimately have a trickle-down effect on the patient care your team provides. Because personalized and spaced-out learning can increase the knowledge and confidence of your team, they’ll be better equipped to provide excellent care.

#2. Incorporate Teamwork

Improving patient outcomes with staff competency is more effective when you build your employee development system around teamwork. A 2018 study of clinical RN competency assessed the impact of having a peer review process. The results showed that evaluation from different peers enhanced professionalism and translated to measurable, positive patient outcomes.

Naturally, patient safety is increased through staff training. But as you look at your competency assessment frameworks, don’t just look at what technical education your staff needs. Look at how you’re developing them and build teamwork into your process.

How Can You Foster Teamwork In Continuous Learning for Health Care Teams?

CHCI’s Competency Suite not only includes Initial and Ongoing Competency Components, but it also includes a Peer Feedback Component that makes it easy to collaborate across all levels of your team.

This unique feature empowers each member of your staff to have autonomy over their own development and gain personalized assessments from leadership, supervisors, peers, and their own self-reflection. 

With the Peer Feedback Component, you have built-in ways to help each person at every level undergo meaningful personal growth. Plus, you also have a practical means to create a culture of constructive feedback across teams. 

Within the Component, users can see reporting of summarized assessment highlights and detailed individual results. This makes it easier to help team members bridge their own health care skill gaps effectively and leads to better care for patients.

#3. Offer Different Competency Assessment Frameworks

Along with creating collaboration across team members, setting up different types of learning opportunities is important. Effective training includes opportunities to increase metacognition (thinking about what you’re learning) and active learning (doing things and thinking about what you’re doing).

Both help your staff learn a new skill and retain it. So when it comes to competency assessment frameworks, having diverse evaluation methods can help you better capture how effective your health care workforce development strategies are. 

For example, incorporating high-fidelity training was found to increase students’ and staff nurses’ confidence. A different study of health care teams also found that continuing professional development is most effective with a combination of formal and informal learning opportunities. That same study also speaks to how including eLearning can make employee development more cost-effective, flexible, and accessible for team members.

How Can You Set Up Different Competency Assessment Frameworks?

CHCI is a tool designed with health care professionals for health care professionals, so we built it with your needs in mind. Including, for example, the ability to work with different assessment touchpoints for more effective development. Here’s a list of assessment types our Competency Suite can work with:

Setting up different types of assessments can be time-consuming, although as you can see from the studies above it’s a worthwhile investment. Ultimately, doing so ensures that staff have better recall of what they’ve learned, which makes it more likely they’ll retain that knowledge while caring for patients.

Having a digital solution for health care competency like CHCI can also streamline the work it takes and give your preceptors more flexibility in how they assess staff competency.

#4. Empower Your Administration Team

Speaking of the staff supporting your competency program, we can’t overlook the role administrators play. The administrative team is the heart of how you tackle improving patient outcomes with staff competency. They’re the ones who develop and implement policy and compliance requirements, track documentation, allocate resources, and support program improvements.

Published in 2023, this review validates the impact that administrative decisions and practices have on patient safety and satisfaction. Ultimately, the best way to help your administration team do great work as they facilitate competency is to:

• Invest in technology to help streamline processes and data.
• Promote value-based care through learning and feedback structures.
• Collect and make data accessible to facilitate addressing health care disparities.

Focusing on these areas can help improve the processes and administration of your health care workforce development strategies. It also helps your organization collect the data that’s important for benchmarking your team against others in the industry. Plus, if you’re working toward Magnet® or Pathway to Excellence® designations, your administration team can more easily monitor progress and provide the required documentation.

How Can You Set Up Your Administrative Team for Success?

Properly collecting information and tracking data is time-consuming, but CHCI’s software can help simplify your administrative team’s workload. Some of the ways it helps include:

• Streamlining data entry from users and giving reviewers easy access to verify documentation.
• Tying in with DDCT® and ODF® reporting so there’s no need to re-upload data that’s already been collected.
• Including a customizable career advancement, achievement, and compensation tool.
• Offering ultra-secure access to data from any web-connected device.
• Integrating with your organization’s LMS of choice.

Sound appealing? If you’re ready to empower your administrators and staff with the tips we’ve shared, see how CHCI can help you introduce effective improvements with a free demo.